What is Web Analytics? [Definition]

Consistently improving the user experience for your website is only possible if you know your customers well. To get the right metrics about your customers, you need to place proper strategies to stay ahead of your competitors and act according to the changing business and customer demand. But, getting accurate insights into your customer’s changing behavior is only possible if you have the right tools at your disposal. Every second is crucial as you might lose significant opportunities to your competitors. This is where the marketers rely on web analytics to understand their customers and the ways to keep them engaging.

Today, every marketer uses this tool as a mandatory part of marketing. You might see a dedicated tea working on generating reports and using that data to make decisions that favor the company’s success. Only the right tool can make the task easier for marketers. So, if you are new to this technology, you can go through this article to enhance your knowledge of Web Analytics and how to use it to improve your business success rate. Let’s get started with the basic definition of web analytics.

What is Web Analytics? [Definition]

Web analytics simply refers to data measurement, helping marketers analyze and report customers’ changing behavior across web pages. Today, you can encounter that the company creates a website but focuses on its online presence, as people use the internet to find any information and make their decisions. The success of any website relies on how its visiting customers react to its content. Thus it is essential to understand the demands and interests of your customers.

There is no doubt how digital marketing and other online marketing platforms have impacted customers’ behavior patterns. So, you have to consider several factors while choosing your web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics; it must include session duration, page views, and sources, helping the marketers understand how these customers have landed on your page and use the information from your website.

You can calculate several metrics using the web analytics tool that helps companies take accurate decisions and improve your website’s overall outlook. Once you draw the analysis, companies can work on a benchmarking system highlighting a key performance indicator.

Why is Web Analytics important?

Online business is all about having customers to generate leads and take your business in a new direction. If your website is not getting enough traffic, it is worth analyzing what stops the customers from getting to your website. To gather invaluable insights, you need web analytics to help you understand how your customers behave. Web analytics helps every type of business to excel and improve their sales. Whether you are a small or large business, everyone needs to measure what they are doing and what results they are getting. Let;’s see how web analytics is essential for your business.

• Understand your potential customers- knowing your potential customers is the key to your business’s success. Once you know your customer’s interest, you can make the desired changes to your website. Thus, insights into your customer’s behavior are getting more critical with time. It proves beneficial for small businesses as they will understand their scope for improvement and get to the heights within no time. You can only improve the overall experience for your customers with the right web analytics tool. You will get metrics, such as why type of customers are landing on your website, their location, interests, and other related information.

• Identify the frequently visited page- Not only this, but you will also get to understand which content on your website is getting the most number of visits, the average duration on that page, the bounce rate for pages, and others. Every type of business needs to gather such insights. It makes it easier for you to understand what the customers like reading and analyze the missing elements on pages. It will help you make data-based decisions, resulting in more accurate results. It will gather data and generate a report based on that, helping you optimize your website accordingly.

• Improving SEO for your website- SEO is one of the crucial factors in deciding the success of any small business. The organic traffic received by a business directly indicates the number of leads and conversions. If you have a growing business, then implementing strategies for SEO is necessary to gain authenticity and create a reputation in the market.

If you can get valuable insights into customers’ demographics, you can efficiently create targeted content to engage them. If you are a small business owner and wonder how web analytics tools help improve your website’s SEO, it is simple. All you need is to create reports with the necessary elements. One of the most commonly used analytics tools is Google Analytics, which will help you track and identify the search queries that majorly impact your site’s traffic.

• Referral traffics is essential for any business to generate. Track referrals- not only this but with a web analytics tool, you can also track the referral traffic to your website. You can create tactics after you get insights into your traffic and understand which area needs improvement to increase the referral traffic.

• Outbound links- only relying on the consistent and heavy referral traffic is not enough for your business to grow. Outbound links are equally important, and with web analytics, you can also work on that. Web analytics tool allows marketers to view the top links that have been visited by customers, leading them to the landing page. Outbound links help increase the range of your website and increase the chances of visiting your website. You can even get to collaborate with other businesses to increase your reach.

• E-commerce metrics- if you have an e-commerce website and your customers are bouncing back without making any sales. It will be a heart-wrenching situation for you. You will implement different strategies to make that work. Web analytics make the analysis easier with the right tools to understand which element restricts your customer’s decision. Once you understand your customer’s pain points, you can make the right changes and start getting positive results.

How can companies use Web Analytics?

The demand and usage of web analytics may vary depending on what they want to measure and what metrics are crucial for their business. Several metrics contribute together and are equally crucial to the success of any website. If you ace the methods to analyze each factor, you can provide an excellent user experience to your customers and lead your competitors. But, it can be confusing sometimes which factor to analyze and what to measure.

So, to help you with your challenges in deciding what you can measure, we have listed some mandatory factors to look at while using web analytics tools.

• Measuring performance- if you do not know how your website is performing, you cannot make the changes to resolve the pain point of your customers. So, the first thing you must measure is the performance of your website. It may include several; factors that decide the performance of your website, such as how visitors are getting to the landing page, bounce rate, total average visits, location of your customers, and others. It will help you get valuable insights for your business that helps the marketers to take calculated decisions, resulting in guaranteed success.

• Customer’s information- customers’ interests can impact the success of your website. If the content is not up-to-date or per the customer’s interest, you might lose the business to your competitors. Thus, understanding your customers is essential. Thus, you need to gather information about customers and how they behave once they land on your website. Web analytics tools help marketers to generate reports with all relevant information about the customer’s activities. Marketers use that report to understand the customers’ pain points and recommend the desired changes to increase the success rate.

• Marketing optimization- companies want to make a solid online presence using the right marketing strategy in this digitization world. If the company invests in online ads, it must track its returns on those investments. Web analytics tool helps you to get that information. One web analytics tool is Google Analytics, which helps you understand which online ad efficiently sends more traffic to your website, especially for e-commerce websites. You can use these results to re-design your marketing strategy.

• Optimizing content- if you have the right marketing strategy that is effective enough to gather the customers, but your content is not as per the customer’s interest, they will tend to bounce back without action. You can effectively understand your website’s content to engage customers with a web analytics tool. You can also generate a detailed report with all the weak points. It helps you improve your content and make it as per your customers’ interests.

Importance of Web Analytics for different teams

Different uses web analytics tools in different ways. Any website creation company consists of several teams with different working, but all contribute together to improve the user experience for the website. This section has mentioned how different teams can use web analytics tools to analyze the website’s performance.

• Marketing teams

Marketing is one of the crucial sectors for any website as it decides its online presence. But to, understanding how different marketing strategy is working and generating leads is also important. Web analytics tools help the marketing teams analyze web traffic, customer behavior, and conversions.

Marketing teams track campaigns using unique campaign attribution links and measure their effect on customers, how much time they spent on site, sales funnel performance, and conversions. It helps them to understand which marketing strategy works well in improving sales.

• UI/UX teams

A website without an optimal user experience cannot do wonders for increasing sales. People will bounce back if they do not feel connected or find the website intimidating to keep them engaging. User experience and interactive interface is one o the crucial factors in engaging the customers. UI/UX teams use the insights from the web analytics tool to improve the areas that need extra work. The team can analyze the customers’ activities via recorded sessions with the insights. It helps the team to understand the effectiveness of CTA buttons.

• Product teams

The product team makes all the relevant decisions regarding the procedure based on the analytics data. Product managers mainly gather the metrics regarding the landing and exit pages, most visited pages, devices, and users’ browsers to make better product decisions. They make changes and analyze them immediately if they worked or not. If not, they try another tactic to get guaranteed results. Also, they conduct A/B testing to compare the results to make decisions. Some web analytics tools allow you to conduct A/B testing and test different website variants.

• Technical teams

Technical teams use web analytics tools to understand and analyze visitors’ technical properties, such as operating system, what browser they are using to access their website, device types (desktop or mobile), and system resolutions, and optimize the code for the most common ones.

These types of analytics are crucial for determining the technical problems related to the web application, such as client-side JavaScript errors, 404 errors, rendering images, or speed problems. The team resolves the problems to imp[rove the website’s performance.

What types of web analytics must you track?

Web analytics helps measure and analyze several essential metrics in deciding the website’s performance. We have mentioned some of the critical metrics you must consider measuring.

• Incoming traffic

Incoming traffic refers to the number of customers visiting the website within a specific period. It is an important metric to measure as it lets you understand how much your website is getting noticed. If you do not have adequate incoming traffic, you are lacking somewhere and analyzing that pain point can be possible using the web analytics tool.

Suppose you have about 50 visitors per day, then it is considered to be having meager web traffic. You need to take the necessary steps to improve the user experience to attract more traffic.

• Bounce rates

It refers to the measurement when a customer reverts from your website within a few seconds after landing on your website. It is the measurement of the percentage of user visits measured against your overall traffic that makes up your bounce rate:

It is another important metric as it tells you if there are any possible usability issues with your website. There could be several reasons for a high bounce rate, such as Long loading times, a clunky navigation system, or unattractive web design.

The average bounce rate is somewhere between 41 and 55 percent. Ensure that the bounce rate is not higher than 30 percent; you need to look closely.

• Traffic sources

Customers mostly find your website via external links that land you on a specific website. The pages linking to your site are considered the crucial traffic sources, and they could be Search engines, external links from other sites, links from email campaigns, or links from different social platforms.

Make sure that you work on all four sources of traffic. However, the significant consideration should be the search engines, as they have the potential to bring in massive traffic numbers. Using web analytics tools help you to monitor your traffic sources and plan your strategy accordingly. For example, if you are not getting much traffic from the search engines, you should consider revising your keyword strategy.

• Desktop vs. mobile visits

Today, mobile is one source that people get information via the internet. It helps people to access data while on the go. So, you also need to consider that your website should be compatible with different mobile devices.

You can easily track the rate customers visit your site through the desktop or mobile browsers with the proper analytics tools. It is necessary to understand which device experience is more important for the users.

• New and returning visitors

Every website company wants their customer to come back and make the purchase or take some actions to generate more leads. For that, understanding the core audience is necessary. You can get valuable information or metrics about your customers using web analytics.

Different team members have different ideas about a decent returning user rate. As suggested, if your traffic is around 30 percent of your total,

Web Analytics Best Practices

Web analytics is essential for gathering valuable metrics about your website to improve its overall experience. But, if you do not analyze the metrics properly, you might get the expected results. So, make sure that you consider the below mentioned best practices to gather analytics to get guaranteed results.

• Emphasizing a data-driven environment for decision-making. Once you gather the relevant data, you will have the answer to whether you have met your goals. Also, you will get to understand the scope of improvement and determine what steps can be taken to improve your KPIs. is your content up-to-date, or is the website getting enough traffic, etc.?
• Do not only rely on the traffic reports. Creating reports about visits, page views, top sources, or top pages only skims the surface. Using large numbers can be misleading, as only having high traffic does not result in any website’s complete success site. So consider other factors also, analyze them, and use the metrics to improve your website accordingly.
• If you’re generating reports without specific metrics, it’s no use. Ensure you have accurate and meaningful data to display your website’s performance. Also, it lets them understand the scope of improvement.
• Avoid being snapshot-focused in reporting. Make sure that you not only consider analyzing the website activities during the traffic surge or capture the more prosperous and more complex web experiences that are happening online now. Evaluating different metrics about the visitors, such as user-lifetime value and others, provides a longer-term understanding of people and users.
• Communicate clearly with stakeholders. Make sure you know your audience, including their weaknesses and strong points. Be consistent in providing the relevant information while communicating with the stakeholders.

Conclusion

Marketing is an expensive strategy that is now becoming important for a solid online presence and to attract potential customers to increase sales. Many people run their websites without analyzing the metrics and understanding how their website performs. Getting consistent insights into your website’s performance will help you improve your customers’ experience. Today, online websites face massive competition endorsing the same product and sharing content. So, having the proper metrics will not help your business to grow. So, you have to be on your toes to get the relevant data about your website.

This article will help you understand why gathering and analyzing metrics can help your business scale. You can also follow the best practices for consistent success and results.

Vijay Singh Khatri

My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.