Why Are Web Analytics Helpful?
Web Analytics are the holy grail of website traffic and user behavior. It can be described as the entire process of collection, measurement, and analysis of data to better understand and optimize the website. Basically, it tells us who visited, from where, and what they did during their visit.
Web Analytics is one of the most important factors of digital marketing since it allows website owners to tweak and test variants of their website and ads to analyze what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.
This facilitates a better understanding of customer behavior. Also referred to as Online Analytics, Web Analytics analyzes the visitor data and traffic from several angles to conclude which websites are bringing the traffic.
As a web marketer, our main objective is to elevate user experience in the website and better the user experience in the website. Proper implementation and understanding of web analytics help in building a compelling online presence. This, in turn, will help in business and revenue growth.
With the advancement in technology, digital strategies have also advanced. There are now plenty of web analytics tools- some are even free like google analytics – to help you take care of your online business.
Types of Web Analytics
1. Onsite Web Analytics:
Onsite Web analytics measures and focuses on the actual visitor behavior of the traffic that your website gets. It encompasses metrics like a visit, bounce rate, click, session duration, etc.
2. Offsite Web Analytics:
Off-site web analytics focuses on observing and measuring potential website audience. It encompasses metrics such as guest blogging, social media marketing, etc.
Benefits of Web Analytics
â It provides you valuable insights into customer behavior like how much time they spend on your website and what engages them.
â Helps in collecting data off social media thus giving information on how your brand is doing on different social media.
â Helps to improve bounce rate and increase ROI.
â Can be utilized to result in better conversion rates.
â Track the effectiveness of the one marketing campaign.
What can you measure with Web Analytics?
1. Total number of visitors
This represents the total traffic your website is getting. A simple free Google Analytics tool should help you with this.
2. Traffic sources and Channels that drive visitors
The traffic you are getting could be from several sources. Knowing which channel is driving the most traffic and which one is driving the least traffic will let you know which marketing scheme is working and which is not.
The traffic sources are mainly from search engines, social media networks, links from other websites, and email campaigns. Search engine traffic can be built by the traditional Search engine optimization method or the paid advertising like Google ads.
3. New visitors and core audience
While acquiring new visitors is always the goal of a business, you should now forget about the existing ones. The returning visitors will help you create brand awareness.
4. Location of the visitors
Knowing the demographics and locations of visitors will help you target the audience that converts the most in the future. This is especially helpful in the hotel and travel industry to know where travelers are coming from, for example.
5. The device (desktop or mobile) the visitors are using
Depending on the data, you can make the website more device and browser-friendly. If you see there are more users coming from mobile devices, you may look to speed up site time on mobile, look at where users drop off to cut or refine content, and even shift your ad spend towards mobile users.
6. Bounce rate and page load time
Your website should be engaging so that visitors donât leave the page right after landing on it. One of these things you can do for this is work on the page load time. The greater the page load time, the higher the bounce rate.
According to Pingdom.com – “The average bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%. As soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds!”
How valuable is this information to you? What would a 29% increase in visitor retention do for your bottom line?
7. Most visited pages
Upon knowing which one of the web pages are visited the most, you can imitate the content strategy and keyword usage tactics on other webpages too. If this is a blog for example, you can quickly tell which content is the most popular for your readers and use that to write more of the same subject, or optimize your Call to Actions.
8. Average time spent on a website by visitors
On average, how much time does a visitor spend on your website? Does the user activity end by taking a desired action on the website?
9. The keyword search that brought visitors
Is your keyword research strategy working? Which keywords are the visitors using to find you? Although Google has omitted organic search terms from Analytics for years now, some traffic sources still send it along. Albeit Google is the #1 search engine so you’d really want to analyze Keyword data from Paid Ad traffic. More on that in a future article!
10. Landing and exiting pages
Summarizes which pages the visitors mostly come through and which page shows the exit door for them. Exit pages are used to help indicate where users are dropping off and can even entail how far they went down the page (eg; heatmaps) or what they did before exiting (eg; event tracking). These are popular when used with a 360 view of all pages and behavior carried out by a User before exiting, called a “Funnel”.
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Web Analytics, Best Practices
So you’ve got a bunch of data, now what? Being able to put your valuable data to good use is the key to collecting it in the first place. Although we’ll cover this topic more in depth in a future article, here are some of the initiatives and areas of impact you should be thinking of immediately when retaining data or even setting up events;- Focusing on activities like user-lifetime value and customer retention to have a broader understanding of visitorsâ mindset.
- Know the target audience, maintain consistency and credibility in the information you provide.
- Concentrate on more than just visitor statistics like visitor numbers and page views.
- Focus on the channels that bring in the traffic. This will help you know which one your marketing scheme is working and which isnât.
- Use-data driven approach to take any decisions on your website rather than relying on hunches.
- Utilize A/B testing to measure campaign performance and website or landing page versions
What are the popular Web Analytics tools?
There are popular free and paid tools available to analyze the web and track almost anything on your website. Some of these tools are too complex for a beginner, however, anyone with a website can benefit from using simple but effective web analytics tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Note: Choose the web analyzing tools depending upon what you wish to track and your goals.
1. Google Analytics
More than 29 million websites are reported to use Google analytics. This user behavior analysis tool helps the website owner to monitor and analyze which sources are bringing the visitors, which pages are getting the most views, the average time a visitor spends on a website, bounce rate, conversion rate and so much more.
This tool or some variant is a must for any business as it’s the heart of your website traffic insights.
2. Social media analytics tools
This web analytics tool helps you monitor and manage all the social media platform data. Social media analytics tools like Sprout Social and BuzzSumo have a feature that facilitates one to compare the social media performance with competitors to observe what they are doing better than you. Furthermore, it also helps with keywords, hashtags, and paid marketing campaigns.
3. SEO optimization and analytics tools
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Search engines are the most popular way to bring massive traffic to your website. The SEO analytics tools can help you work on Search Engine Optimization by providing information on keywords, backlinks, site audits, etc.
Some popular SEO analytics tools for web analysis are; SE Ranking, Ahrefs, Semrush and Alexa.
Thanks for sticking with me on this long introduction to web analytics! I wanted to start with a more in depth guide before continuing the Journey with more specific tips and how-to’s that will help anyone new to Analytics get the most out of their data.
Feel free to leave a comment with any questions or ideas that come to mind!
