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Each year, more and more people are coming online to shop. In today’s economic climate, people want the best deal possible, and recognize that shopping online helps them accomplish that goal. Online marketers, new and old, face unique opportunities in today’s economic landscape. This 26-part series covers topics A-Z that will help you be a better online marketer. While each section is only an introduction, I will go into them in-depth in future articles.

A – Analytics

One of the greatest benefits of the online environment is that data is captured at almost every turn. Whereas traditional marketing (print, tv, radio) was much harder to measure and associate ROI, online marketing provides marketers with all the data points they need to make correct decisions.

If you own a website, you need to, at a minimum, be using an analytics software like Google Analytics. You can measure how many people are visiting our site, where they are coming from, what pages are most popular, what pages people are exiting the most, etc. By understanding this information, you can better manage the paths on your website.

This is akin to a retail store being able to measure how many people come to their store, how they traveled to the store, where they came from, and once in the store, which products they viewed, how long they viewed them, which products they put in their cart, and what they looked at before exiting the store without a purchase. This is data online retailers have in abundance.

Once you have an analytics solution in place, you can begin to measure 3 important areas---paths, people, and products.

Paths – use analytics to understand the virtual paths people are taking in your store. What steps do they take most often when purchasing an item? This knowledge will help promote the pages on those common paths. Similarly, you can improve pages that get in the way of the conversion path.

People – use analytics to understand demographic, psychographic, referral data and other important information about your users.

Products – use analytics to determine what your most successful product, product groups, and product offerings are.

While analytics are not essential to running a website, they are essential to running a successful and effective website.

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Jack Franklin is an online marketer who specializes in website analytics, A/B and MVT testing, customer-centricity, and relevance. He is the owner of Jack Franklin ties (http://www.wearjack.com), an online site dedicated to bringing brand-name quality neckwear at reasonable prices.