How to Use the Internet to Advertise, Promote, and Market Your Business - Essay Example

WEB ANALYSIS By Web Analysis The recent years have seen increased participation in e-commerce by a wide range of organizations. This increment can be attributed to the rising global spread of the internet over time. As such, the internet has provided organizations with an effective and highly convenient platform for advertising and creating awareness about their existence. However, amid the rising participation and reliance on the internet, levels of competition between organizations in the same industry have risen significantly. This has created the need for web analytics enabling organizations to measure effectiveness of their websites. Web analytics delves on collecting, measuring and analyzing web data to facilitate comprehension of web efficacy consequently leading to web usage optimization (Cutroni, 2010, p.1). However, web analytics is not used only as a measure of web traffic but rather has other applications such as carrying out market research (Burby and Atchison, 2007). Additionally, web analytics has enabled competing organizations to compare their performance against competitors in a bid to retain relevance in the respective industries. In order to increase comprehension of the application of web analytics, it is important to delve on specific and real world case scenario. For example, using web analytics to measure efficacy and competition levels of the British museum website against strong competitors such as Louvre Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. Increasing website efficiency requires organizations to carry out a competitor analysis. A competitor analysis entails comparing the efficiency of competitors’ websites in order to cover the loop holes discovered in a bid to gain competitive advantage (Youngman, 1998, p.2). Competitor analysis may be carried out using relatively many different mechanisms. However, the choice of the mechanism to use is dependent upon the nature of the industry in play. Nonetheless, in carrying out competitor analysis for the British Museum application of the web analytics approach is seemingly more appropriate. This is because the web analytic approach provides extensive web data analysis and measures ranging from web traffic to bounce rates among others. Moreover, web analytics facilitates market research by providing information regarding number of visitors and number of page views. As such, it is possible to determine popularity trends and compare with other competing websites, which is highly crucial in carrying put market research. Competitor analysis requires comparison of key features and the important attributes of the organization’s website against competitors. An effective way of measuring efficiency of a website is comparing bounce rates of the websites. Bounce rates are a reflection of the percentage of people who visit the website and exit rather than continuing to view the other pages within the website (Thurow and Musica, 2009, p.103). In simpler terms, bounce rates are represent the proportions of visits that do not go beyond the first page of the website. As such, bounce rates can be used as a measure of the effectiveness of the website especially in relation to attractiveness. It is expected that if the first page of the website is highly attractive, visitors will be prompted to go deeper into the other pages (Nahai, 2012). This implies that high bounce rates indicate that the face of the website is not effectiveness in ensuring continued indulgence into the site. However, it is important to note that bounce rates are dependent on the nature of the industry hence do not necessarily reflect website failures (Chaters, 2011, p.80). For example, websites whose main purpose is to display searched information such as dictionaries and recipe sites may have high bounce rates but it does not imply poor performance. Nonetheless, bounce rates are an effective measure of performance especially for e-commerce business ventures. The bounce rates of the British Museum are 55.20% while Louvre Museum’s are 50.70% and Metropolitan Museum of Arts’ are 45.40% (Alexa.com). Going by these results it is evident that the British Museum has high bounce rates compared to the competitors. This implies that the number of visits beyond the first page is relatively low hence there is need to improve the quality of the website to keep with the increasing competition. Attractiveness of websites is dependent upon a number of factors such as arrangement and graphics quality. Moreover, bounce rates can be lowered by ensuring that the website is easily navigable. However, high bounce rates may also be as a result of efficacy of the website to provide relevant information sought by most visitors. Nonetheless, most people visiting such websites are likely to go beyond the first page especially due to searches on the available items. As such in relation to bounce rates, the British Museum is arguably ranking low necessitating improvements of the website. Web analytics are useful in determining web traffic pertaining to a particular website. Web traffic is based upon the amounts of data sent and received by a visitor in a particular site. As such, web traffic is determined by examining the number of people visiting a particular site and page views over a given period of time (Brown, 2006, p.192). Information obtained from examining web traffic is essential in making improvements to the structures of the page. Additionally, organizations can identify the areas mostly viewed in a bid to make improvements such as either increasing or decreasing bandwidth and determine relevance of content hosted. For example, organizations may decide to improve security on mist visited areas. According to Alexa’s estimations of web traffic on a global scale, the British museum is ranked 37255, Louvre museum at 44297, and Metropolitan museum of Arts at 9877 (Alexa.com). A higher ranking in relation to web traffic implies that the website has relatively many visitors and page views simultaneously. Additionally, web traffic gives a reflection of the popularity of a website. As such, the Metropolitan Museum of Arts may be considered more popular than the British Museum on a global scale and country scale. On a country scale, specifically the United States, the ranks are 23701 and 3106 for British Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Arts respectively. This implies that the British Museum needs to do some improvements on the site and advertisement to increase popularity. Conversely, Louvre’s popularity is relatively lower compared to British Museum. However, Louvre is still a strong competitor hence there is some value in relation to strategies that can be obtained from analyzing it. The success of online businesses is also heavily dependent upon the time spent by individual visitors on the website. Moreover, this increases chances of viewing the site’s content thereby increasing web traffic. Daily time spent on British museum is approximately two hours thirty two minutes. However, the daily time spent on the websites of competitors is much greater with Louvre having 3:09 and metropolitan having 6:00 (Alexa.com). Once again metropolitan emerges the strongest competitor compared to Louvre. Nevertheless, based on time spent British Museum is facing significantly high levels of competition. Measures of website efficiency are seemingly interrelated with one competitive advantage resulting to another and consequently the overall performance. For example, increased popularity of a particular website may result into increased time visits. The amount of time spent in a particular website may be increased by increasing the attractiveness of the site. Additionally, increasing the relevance of the content hosted in a website is may increase time spent in that particular website. For example, posting highly relevant information such as facts and history about art in an interesting and captivating way may encourage visitors to read more consequently increasing time spent. Moreover, time spent may be increased by having a wide range of information hence providing solutions to many internet users’ problems. In order to increase the competitive advantage of a particular website it is also important to consider user preferences. User preferences refer to the most common topics and items searched by internet users. In this particular context, it is important to focus on the most searched artifacts in order to increase relevance of the website. This may be done by determining the top keywords in search engines of competitors in order to also provide some information on these topics. For example, the top keywords for Louvre are other than its identity is mona lisa with traffic levels of 6.23% (Alexa.com). Obtaining relevant information relating to the mona lisa may increase the number of visits in the British Museum website. As such, determining driving forces behind the user’s visits to competitors’ websites may be used to increase a websites relevance and consequently increasing the number of visits. Furthermore, accessibility of an organization’s site is heavily dependent on the links leading to the site. This requires an evaluation of the sites most visited before visiting the organization’s site. Websites at times have links to other sites mainly due to relevance of information and uses as reference sites. Additionally, websites may host links to different websites as an advertising technique thereby increasing awareness about its existence. According to Alexa statistics, British Museum and all the other competitors’ visitors have their previously visited websites as google.com (Alexa.com). Moreover, the number of sites linking to the organizations’ site is also relevant and an important contributor to the number of visits obtained. For example, the increased number of visits to metropolitan website can be attributed to possession of relatively many links. According to Alexa’s statistics, metropolitan has 20737 links while Louvre has 9862 and British Museum has 8914 (Alexa.com). This implies that both metropolitan and Louvre museums have higher chance of getting more visits hence increasing the levels of competition significantly. Additionally, the sites having links to the organization’s website also play a huge role in determining number of visits to the site. This is because links with relatively high number of visitors are bound to provide increasingly high number of visitors to the organization’s website. For example, in addition to having many links, metropolitan’s links have a large client base such as youtube.com and yahoo.com (Alexa.com). As such, metropolitan is bound to present more competition for British Museum as compared to Louvre. In order to gain competitive advantage, British Museum needs to increase the number of links while simultaneously considering the number of people visiting them. In doing so British Museum stands a chance of significantly increasing the number of visits to its website. Conclusively, determining online competition requires an evaluation on a number of factors that contribute to efficiency of a website. For instance, bounce rates are an effective way of determining the efficiency of a website especially in relation to attractiveness. Working towards a reducing the bounce rate may increase time spent on a website. Additionally, it is also important to consider web traffic to determine the most visited sites in order to improve the areas with less visits. Determining user preferences is also essential since it enables organizations to host information and items highly demanded by visitors. In an effort to increase number of visitors, it is also important to increase the number of links associated to the organization’s website. However, making such adjustments requires examination of the relevant competitors in order to learn from their strongest strategies. For example, British Museum has a lot to learn from both Metropolitan and Louvre museums in order to increase efficiency of its website. Works Cited Alexa.com, “Britishmuseum.org”, retrieved http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.britishmuseum.org Alexa.com, “Louvre.fr”, retrieved http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.louvre.fr%2Fen Alexa.com, “metmuseum.com” retrieved http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.metmuseum.org Brown, C 2006, “How to use the internet to advertise, promote, and market your business or website with little or no money”, Ocala, Fla, Atlantic Publ. Burby, J, & Atchison, S 2007, “Actionable web analytics using data to make smart business decisions”, Indianapolis, IN, Wiley Pub. Chaters, B 2011, “Mastering search analytics”, Farnham, OReilly. Cutroni, J 2010, “Google Analytics”, Beijing, China; Cambridge, MA: OReilly. Nahai, N 2012, “Webs of influence: the psychology of online persuasion: the secret strategies that make us click”, Harlow [etc.], Pearson. Thurow, S, & Musica, N 2009, “When search meets web usability”, Berkeley, Calif, New Riders. Youngman, I 1998, “Competitor analysis in financial services”, Cambridge, England, Woodhead Pub. Read More