Browsing by Subject "Web analytics"

Universal Internet has a major role in facilitating information search for consumers. What visitors do online, how their behaviour can be predicted and influenced are one of the most important questions that web site developers and marketing specialists try to figure out. A comprehensive understanding of online behaviour has become a necessity for the success of websites. As there are more and more websites offering similar products to consumers, it is significant to increase the usability of the website and make it easy to find. While some consumers go directly to websites, some use search engines to reach desired websites and others browse websites via referral links. The main research question for this thesis was to analyse what kind of insight Web Analytics reveals about the characteristics of website visitors. The aim for this case study was to highlight with different metrics, the amount of traffic the current marketing tactics have generated and to discuss possible improvements. The theoretical framework of the study was based on the key aspects of the consumer decision process, which focuses on the search of information and the comparison of alternatives before the actual purchase transaction. The study of online purchase behaviour and information search by Comegys et. al. (2006) was in central role of the theoretical framework. As understanding and analysing key metrics played a pivotal role in this research, Plaza (2009) views on the proposed importance of adopting key metrics were used as the basis for the main research question. A pharmaceutical company was the cooperative company of this thesis. The research of the thesis was based on a case study inspecting the web analytics data of the case company’s Finnish and Danish websites. The characteristics of web site visitors were investigated through Google Analytics and web site visitors’ actions on the sites depending on their traffic source were also examined. All the relevant data concerning of consumer behaviour and decision process was collected from the Google Analytics data. The case study of this thesis examined eleven different web metrics collected from two websites during a period of twelve months. With Google Analytics data, the number of visits on a web site and the source of traffic, including organic results from search engines, links from referral web pages or direct access by entering the URL into the web browser was analysed. All these three traffic sources were viewed as different kinds of consumer behaviour. The findings in this study showed that for the case company’s Finnish website, visits generated by search engines bring the most traffic among the selected traffic sources followed by direct traffic and referral traffic. As for Danish web site, the organic traffic remains the source of most traffic while referral visits are the second largest group leaving direct traffic to be the smallest group. The findings from the data show that as the theoretical literature proposed, return visitors did spend a longer time on the site and viewed more pages than new visitors. Both visitor groups - new and returning visitors - spent more time at the web site when they used direct traffic. Findings show that case company websites were highly comparable. Key findings relating to traffic sources and demographics showed only minor differences and can therefore be compared with full confidence.