Business Studies

Digital Marketing Topic 8 Q2
The business goals of an online publisher include increasing the number of paid subscribers and attracting new users to the website. How can analytics be used to help measure those goals? Provide specific examples to illustrate your ideas.

ANSWER

Website Analytics

Since the goal of any of the online publishers is to maintain their existing paid subscribers and at the same time attract new ones to the website. To measure how successful the publisher is in achieving these objectives, they can employ analytics. To begin with, the practice of measuring, collecting, analyzing, and reporting Internet data in order to understand how an audience uses a site and how to improve it is known as web analytics (Saura, Palos-Sánchez, & Suárez 2017). Notably, when a person visits a website, little data tags, known as “cookies,” can be installed in his or her browser. Cookies can also locate additional data files such as server logs, tags, or navigation bars. Arguably, this data can be used to establish whether the new users have joined the subscription and if the existing ones are still frequenting the website.

In addition, a publisher can use qualitative analytics whose data identifies the reasons why a user took a particular action on a website (Hwangbo, Kim, & Cha, 2017). Analytical data can also be obtained by directly questioning users on a variety of issues via surveys that enable users to submit data to a website. It’s most commonly used to specify the amount of conversions or conversion objectives for a website, focus groups, or focus and interviews with users, which provides information on user preferences; hence website’s design is suited to the users liking through the information shared by the users. However, an online publisher may choose not to question users directly but to analyze their behavior and responses to timely questions through A/B testing where two separate versions of a page or a page element, such as a headline, picture, or button. A/B testing is used to improve the effectiveness of a page or site based on key performance indicators such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue per visit, usability studies, or heuristic analysis experts.

References

Hwangbo, H., Kim, Y. S., & Cha, K. J. (2017). Use of the smart store for persuasive marketing and immersive customer experiences: A case study of Korean apparel enterprise. Mobile Information Systems, 2017.

Saura, J. R., Palos-Sánchez, P., & Cerdá Suárez, L. M. (2017). Understanding the digital marketing environment with KPIs and web analytics. Future Internet, 9(4), 76.