Sunday, January 30, 2011

How to Take Advantage of the Internet!

Web Analytics is the answer for markers to understanding how people navigate the web. This tool is imbedded into the code of every website, blog, and social network page. With Web Analytics, marketers can see what part of a page is attracting people's attention and what areas are scaring people off the website. I love this tool because everyone on the Internet can get Web Analytics for their own website or blog!
 This tool is the most interesting market research tool because the consumers are unaware of the fact that they are being "followed" while they navigate through the different websites. The great thing about people not knowing they are being watched, is they are unbiased in their decision process. The downfall traditional market research such as focus groups and in depth interviews, are that people say what they think the interviewer wants them to say which skews all the data collected. People can't really communicate how they surf the web- so traditional market research would not be an ideal way to understand. Thank goodness for web analytics that has allowed researchers to observe web surfers and figure out what part of the website works and what parts don't.
  Another fantastic part of Web Analytics is the speed at which the marketer get their data. As soon as a person comes in and starts surfing around, the data is collected and entered into the Web Analytics program and decisions can be made very quickly. Just think, a few short years ago, it would take weeks or even months to compile all the data from a survey and draw conclusions from that survey!
   The most challenging part of Web Analytics for me, is figuring out which features are the most important to follow and how to interpret those  data points. For example, number of visits in a day, or number of unique visitors in a day? Luckily for us, there are plenty of websites and bloggers out there to help us out! One of those people would be Eric Peterson from Web Analytics Demystified. He has so much knowledge about the workings of Web Analytics and gives great insights to the ethics involved in web analytics. Another fantastic and well respected Analytics blogger is Avinash Kaushik. He writes weekly about different ways to use web analytics and step by step directions on how to implement those tools. If you are in the least bit curious about web analytics and the powers it can give you as a marketer, or web developer check out these two guys!
     I see Web Analytics being one of the biggest assets to market research as life moves to the world wide web. It can help marketers in so many different capacities- and it does it in real time! 
   Still need to get some web analytics of your own? I would suggest Google Analytics because it is free (which is fantastic) and has an entire online university of videos and articles about how to use analytics! Of course there are other sites out there that do the same, this is simply what I use. So, in a few months when I am getting ready to graduate, I will be writing a post here about my findings from my web analytics on this blog. Stay tuned for that and much more!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Welcome!

Hello! My name is Megan and my greatest passion is market research. This may be strange however I find the psychology behind the decisions we make everyday to be fascinating. Trying to figure out the behaviors of people as they are shopping for different types of products and how they change their behaviors based on the product they are purchasing intrigues me.
As technology boomed, market research morphed into a whole new industry. Now many companies get their information from online polls, web analytics, keyword research, observational research and much more. With this blog my goal is to explore these tools and to see how companies are finding out what their consumer does, wants, needs, etc during the shopping experience.