Web analytics is the secret weapon of each successful website project and digital marketing strategy.
By using web analytics, you have the chance to expand and solidify your online presence and make better decisions for your website and the growth of your business.
Analytics tools are an essential part of today’s business strategy, as they grant you detailed and faceted information about how your website performs, and everything your site visitors do once they land on your pages.
Such information is very important, as it can show you which aspects of your website contribute to expanding your business, and which require improvement.
Because of how valuable information web analytics give, they are widely used by marketing experts, web developers, and webmasters who search for ways of making their website projects successful.
In the following paragraphs, you will read about what is web analytics, why it matters so much, various examples of how web analytics can give you various useful insights, and how to use such analytics tools.
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What is Web Analytics
Web analytics is a term that describes a collection of website metrics about website data that can be used to monitor how visitors enter it and what they do on your pages.
Such data is gathered by various analytics platforms that you can incorporate within your website.
Once you set up an analytics tool, it starts gathering and providing information about visitors’ behavior on your website – where are they located, which pages they open, which buttons they click, how much time they spend on your website, do they make a purchase and when they leave.
By using this information, you can start monitoring various dependencies develop an understanding of key performance indicators (KPIs) and eventually make such changes on your web pages that contribute to better UX and more conversions.
Web analytics tools measure various metrics on your website such as:
- The overall number of site visits.
- Time visitors spend on your website.
- Your most visited web pages.
- Geographical location of visitors.
- Site visitors’ interests.
- Many more details.
More importantly, web analytics tools help you monitor how well your conversion rates and customer journey strategies are performing – by delving deep into web analytics, you can also measure:
- Number of subscriptions to your blog.
- Number of purchases for a certain period.
- Sales funnel statistics.
- Dependencies between various metrics.
- Detailed segmentation of visitors, subscribers, and customers.
Keep in mind that these are only a few metrics you can monitor via a web analytics tool.
Why Do Web Analytics Matter
It is said that you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
This saying is particularly true for the online performance of your website.
Knowing more about your site visitors and their on-site behavior can help you get new ideas and find insights into how to generate more traffic and turn more visitors into paying customers.
Analytics tools help you gain new website content ideas and unfold better-focused and more successful advertisement campaigns.
Furthermore, web analytics can help you find who your most valuable customers are, where they come from, and what they need, so you can find more like them and provide them with the right experience, so they remain loyal to your brand.
In details, here’s how web analytics help your website project:
Get a better understanding of your visitors. Knowing who your visitors are and how they behave on your pages can give you an insight into how to modify your marketing strategy, so it better resembles the requirements and needs of said visitors.
For example, via web analytics, you can notice that the majority of your visitors are 20-25-year-old males who come from two cities in Germany and oftentimes purchase the same types of products.
You can benefit from this information in two main ways:
- Learn more about this particular age group, their interests, motivations, and desires, so you can mold your website content in a way that resembles their worldview, so they feel comfortable among your pages. This approach can help them retain their interest and eventually become paying customers and also can attract other similar customers.
- You can design a focused Social Media ad campaign promoting the said products only to other 20-25-year-old male audience that lives in these two German cities. This approach offers a greater chance for generating purchases than the one that showcases your ads to random and irrelevant audiences across the given social media platform.
Monitor the performance of your sales funnel. With web analytics, you can precisely monitor whether visitors follow your sales funnel or not.
Web analytics can help you understand which site aspects are well-built and prompt visitors to take the next step and which discourage visitors from making conversions. Once you acquire such knowledge, you can test and apply design ideas and content that contribute to better conversion rates.
Monitor KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Web analytics can also help you monitor your key performance indicators – the events that mark a notable action that a given site visitor has completed. Such include subscribing to your newsletter, registering to your website, and making a purchase.
Something more, via web analytics tools, you can pay a closer look at how different visitors follow different paths towards completing a goal. This can help you sort out your website audience into different segments and come up with various approaches that suit best the needs of each individual segment for optimal website engagement and conversion efficiency.
Improve website content. Web analytics can help you monitor which pages are opened the most and which blog posts (if you have any) receive the most views. By doing so, you can focus your endeavors on creating similar content, so it remains relevant to your audience.
Enhance Website Monetization Prospects. Should you wish to monetize your website, keep in mind that potential advertisers and potential collaborative brands would be interested in your website performance – the better the traffic and conversions, the higher the chances of working with you.
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An Example Of How Web Analytics Help You
Imagine this scenario:
Via web analytics tool you notice a certain number of people visit your homepage after following a link placed on your social media account.
Once on your homepage, after a few seconds, they click a CTA button and go to your products page. Once there, they open various product pages and spend different amounts of time browsing your products.
However, they leave your website without making a purchase.
Now, thanks to web analytics, you know several facts about your visitors and their on-site behavior that would otherwise remain oblivious to you:
- Your social media account is persuasive enough to prompt people to visit your website.
- Your homepage contains high-quality content, so visitors follow the CTA buttons.
- Visitors are interested in your products, as they spend time browsing these pages.
- None of them added a product to the cart and none finished the purchase procedure.
Now you can start thinking about what can you do to prompt future visitors to make a purchase successfully.
For example, you can do a full audit of your product pages and find out the exact issue – problems with page performance, missing product description, or, for example, the Purchase button not working properly.
Now that you have such insights, you can start editing your pages based on reliable data results.
In other examples, you can use the data gathered from the web analytics tools to:
- Calculate what percentage of Social Media followers come to your website.
- Calculate what percentage of site visitors follow your sales funnel.
- Calculate what percentage of site visitors become customers.
- Calculate what percentage of Social Media followers become your customers.
- Run A/B tests and monitor which idea contributes to more conversions.
- Notice changes in traffic and find out what exactly causes this fluctuation.
- Launch customized campaigns for different types of customers for optimal results.
The possibilities that web analytics give you are quite abundant.
How to Use Web Analytic Tools
Using web analytics tools on your website is simple.
The process is comprised of 4 main stages:
- Set up an account for your preferred analytics tool.
- Connect the analytics platform with your website.
- Let it gather site data over time.
- Browse the collected data and use it to your advantage.
By far, the most popular web analytics platform is Google Analytics (GA) with its latest iteration being Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Google Analytics comes with a free and paid version and provides you with everything you would need to make a comprehensive site analysis and improve your conversions and online presence.
Google Analytics can seamlessly integrate with your website via a special Google tracking code, regardless if it is a CMS-based one, or built from scratch via HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Check out how to set up Google Analytics on your website and see how to navigate Google Analytics for quick and efficient analysis of your entire website data.
Conclusion
Web analytics tools help you understand whether you attract the right audience for your website, how visitors behave on your pages, and how well your on-site customer journey strategy is performing at any given time.
With such analytical knowledge on your side, you can make informed decisions and make such changes on any aspect of your website so that it can become more prominent on the web and generate more traffic, subscribers, and paying customers.
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