Let’s consider you have recently created a beautiful website for your brand. Everything seems to work fine, except for the fact that your revenue isn’t increasing. You aren’t able to understand the reason behind it. Fret not, there is a way that you can check your website’s performance. Web Analytics allows you to collect all the data related to your website thus giving you useful insights.
Using a Web Analytics tool you can collect data about how many customers visit your website, how much time they spend on your website, what content they like the most, are they just site visitors or plan to buy something and so on. Initially, this huge amount of information may seem overwhelming but once you get a hold of what is important and what isn’t, you will be reaping the results of it.
Let’s get started with what Web Analytics is all about.
What is Web analytics?
To put it simply, Web analytics is the measurement and analysis of data to inform an understanding of user behavior across web pages. With Web Analytics you can measure the following metrics that can give you useful insights into how are your web pages performing, and how your customers are behaving on your site. With these simple steps, you can make a huge difference in your brand’s performance. Let's understand this by taking a simple example. Let’s say that your Web Analytics shows you that your visitors aren’t spending more than 3 seconds on your website. This clearly means that your website is not user-friendly, or it might not have the content that can attract customers. You can easily make changes in your website and recheck the Web Analytics data to see if it made any difference at all or not.
What are some Web Analytics Metrics
These are some of the Web Analytics Metrics that you can consider while forming strategies for your brand.
1) Audience Metrics
Pageviews − Pageviews is the number of views of a page.
Bounce rate − Bounce rate reflects the percentage of visitors returning back only after visiting one page of your website.
Demographic info − Demographic data shows Age and Gender.
Devices − This data shows the devices info. In devices info, you can easily find how many percentages of visitors come from mobile, how many come from desktop, how many come from tablets, etc.
2) Acquisition Metrices
Traffic Sources
Organic traffic is the traffic coming through all search engines
Social traffic is the traffic coming through all social media platforms
Referral traffic is the traffic coming through where your website is linked.
Direct traffic is the traffic coming directly to your website.
3) Site Content Metrics
Landing pages − Landing pages are the pages where the visitors land first. Using these metrics, you can analyze how many pages are getting 50% or more traffic on the website. So, you can easily find which type of content is working for you.
Site speed − Site speed is the metrics used for checking page timing. Using these metrics, you can find which page is taking more time to load.
Why is Web Analytics useful?
Now you might be thinking how is these sheer amount of data useful to me? What do I do knowing that my bounce rate is very high? Well, Web Analytics is all about that. It lets you know what isn’t working for your website and in fact, give you some help with forming new strategies for your brand.
1) Get to know your customers
Certainly, Web Analytics can give you user demographics. Are they male/female, what age group they belong to, married or unmarried, what devices do they use to search for you, how much time they spend on your websites? For instance, you have a baby care products website. You know that your products are most useful to males and females (who are parents) of the age group 21-35, who are possibly searching for baby care products online. Then you can simply show your ads to them so that they know about your brand too.
2) Optimize is your site’s SEO
The more organic traffic your business site receives, the more leads and conversions it gains. Website analytics help your site’s SEO in various ways. By knowing your visitors’ demographics and interests, you can create targeted content and get better visibility on search engines.
3) Know what content is useful
Web Analytics gives information about the content on your site. You can focus on what content gets most views and according to demographics of the audiences of that content, you can further pinpoint your targeted audience.
So this was a brief introduction of Web Analytics. If you really want to understand your customers (which we suggest is a good practice) then you should definitely devote some time to Web Analytics.