Nowadays, every business is going online and is struggling to have a solid online presence. But, how can a business understand the performance of their website and eliminate loopholes that are impacting their customer base? To get deeper insights about your website, you require tools that will help you understand the working and effectiveness of your website. For getting such analytics, web analytics tools come to the rescue and help you understand the nature of your customers.
Web analytics is not a new process but is effective in improving performance and reducing the weakness of your website. It will improve sales and generate more leads. So, get ready to make your website more innovative and free of flaws. In this article, we will discuss web analytics, its working process, types of web analytics tools, commonly used tools, and the criteria to select an efficient tool for your business.
What is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is crucial as it is the process to get to know your customers and how they behave through your website experience. You will get to track, review, and report data to measure the web activity of your customer and how they are using your website and its components, such as images, links, videos, and others.
You can gather information about your website, such as incoming traffic sources, referring websites, how many views to your website, conversion rates, email registration, and whatnot. All this information is compiled together to generate a detailed report, so you can better understand your customer relationship. Such gathered data helps your business help analyze the entire process and make risk-free decisions.
Web analytics ensure that your customer won’t bounce back by improving the overall experience for your website. Below are some areas where analytics help your business to grow.
- It helps the business determine the likelihood of the customers coming back to make another purchase.
- It helps the business to create a personalized experience for their specific customers.
- It lets the business determine which customer is making the most sales and help them with purchasing.
- It helps the business understand the customers’ changing behavior depending on their location, sources, and others.
- It lets the business know which product is top-rated among customers and what they like about that specific product.
- It helps the business to check the click-through rates for their website.
- It ensures that businesses get complete details about their customers and understand their changing behavior.
Web analytics process
Below are the working process for getting the desired web analytics. This process may vary from business to business, as the team’s approach can differ in gathering insights. But below are the standard process that any business can follow if they do not have a specific approach yet.
- Set goals
First of all, each business must understand its goals and how they will achieve it. Set the goal to improve sales, work on the user experience, and change fonts, colors, or brand awareness. Once you have the goal decided, you can work accordingly and use the right tools to achieve them efficiently and quickly. The web analytics tools are available based on your purpose. For example- improving UX (Crazzy egg, Hotjar), improving social media awareness (BuzzSumo), and others.
- Collect data
Now that you know in which direction to process. The next step is to gather the required data to achieve your goal. You can use any web analytics tool for gathering the data, such as google analytics, Optimizely, and others. Also, you can put the filter to the specific data you want to see and generate a detailed report for your consideration and make decisions based on that.
- Process the gathered data
The marketers use the collected data and process the data into actionable information. After getting the processed data, the marketers can decide what they need to do to achieve their goals. They plan strategies and find out how they can implement the changes.
- Identify the key performance indicators.
KPI is a quantifiable measure that helps your business monitor and analyze your customers’ behavior on your websites, such as bounce rates, unique users, user sessions, etc. Once you identify what KPI requires your attention, you can start working and eliminate the weakness to retain your customers and convert the visitors into loyal customers.
- Create strategies
Now create strategies and decide on strategies that you want to follow to work on them accordingly. Align your strategies based on your goals, make desired changes, and achieve better results.
- Testing change
After making changes, you must test that version on your customers to see their behavior. If that does not work, you can make the other changes and keep on making changes until you get the desired results. This might be time-consuming, so hold on tight and test all possible changes that can bring more business to your website. One of the commonly used tests is A/B testing which will help you get to the changes that create more impact on your customers.
Different categories of Web Analytics
You can have either on-site web analytics or off-site web analytics. Let’s discuss both of them.
- Off-site web analytics
Off-site refers to monitoring your website’s performance from outside to get derided information and measure potential customers. It lets you understand how your website is performing concerning your competitors. This type of analytics gathers information from the web, social media, and others.
- On-site web analytics
On-site web analytics shortens your focus strictly on the website internally and using the analytics to track the activity of the incoming customers. The main goal is to see how they interact with your website and its components.
It lets you analyze the file logs and page tagging. The website’s owner can only use such web analytics. They can understand which element is more critical and effectively work for their website to generate more sales.
The log file analysis refers to the managing logs to analyze the data gathered from log files to monitor, troubleshoot, and provide the details on a website’s performance. At the same time, page tagging is about adding code snippets into a website’s HyperText Markup Language code to track website visitors and their interactions across the website.
Web analytics tools
These web analytics have become more accessible since advanced web analytics tools. Such tools come with several features that reduce the manual effort and provide accurate results that affect your decisions. The decisions based on hard facts are more accurate and increase the likelihood of improving the performance and increasing sales.
You will come across several web analytics tools in the market. But for your ease, we have narrowed down your search o some extent of the top 10 web analytics tools to be considered in 2022. Let’s see what these tools have to offer.
1. Google Analytics
It is one of the commonly used web analytics tools that allow you to monitor the behavior of the customers, web traffic, and conversions. Not only this, you can track the page views, time-on-site, bounce rates, and other metrics that decide the overall performance of your website. It lets you understand how customers use your website, so you can take the necessary steps to provide a better experience. Below are some features-
- It provides detailed reports for better understanding.
- It lets you understand how much you have to spend across various media platforms to advertise your website and lets you make informed decisions based on your budget.
- It uses third-party tools for organizing and managing your data.
- It shows seamless integration with other Google solutions for better results.
2. Optimizely
Optimizely is another tool on the list that lets you create digital experiences for transforming your company by making data-driven decisions, rigorous experimentation, and constant invention. This web analytics tool will seamlessly unlock your digital potential. It lets you understand your customers’ experience since they land on your website. Also, you can use it to conduct A/B testing to carry out testing and optimize the online experience for your customers. Below are some features.
- It lets you easily create, customize, and improve a website’s content on a best-in-class enterprise CMS.
- It lets you run multiple shops, inventory, and everything related to e-commerce online and offline.
- It uses AI techniques to test new features and personalize every touchpoint.
- It will analyze each customer’s interaction with your website to understand their behaviors and gather data.
- It helps you improve the content’s quality to keep the customers engaged and take necessary steps, such as making a purchase.
3. Kissmetrics
It is one of the customer analytics platforms gathering website data and presenting it in a readable format for better results. With this platform, you will leverage the benefits of the customer intelligence tool, allowing the business to dive deeper into customer behavior and improve their website’s experience based on that. It helps you create innovative marketing campaigns. Below are some features.
- It lets your business transform more trials into paying customers.
- It helps in generating more revenue per customer.
- It lets you measure monthly recurring revenue by cohort.
- You can seamlessly integrate with Shopify.
- It lets you optimize the overall checkout funnel.
- It provides you with a comprehensive report on subscription revenue.
4. Crazy Egg
This web analytics tool tracks where your customer is clicking on your website and what element is most liked by them. Such information helps the business understand how the customers are behaving on your website and tailor its content and product as per their actions. This tool will also generate heatmaps to deep dive into the information for better clarity. Below are some features.
- This tool will add an additional layer of insights to your Google Analytics data for better understanding.
- You can even narrow down the information to know how your email and ad campaign visitors behave on-site.
- It helps your business by making sure that your CTAs are being seen.
- It lets you know where to place the critical content to get noticed by your potential customers and take the desired action.
- It lets you track what’s happening behind pop-up forms or login screens.
- It lets you record the customer’s sessions o analyze their interaction with your website in real-time.
- It lets you conduct A/B testing to create a winning variant.
5. Spring Metrics
Unlike Google Analytics, Spring Metrics allows you to track the visitor’s journey throughout their session. You will understand where the customer is stopping to take some action or where they left the elements unnoticed and moved further. This helps you make the required changes by analyzing the customer’s behavior in real-time. Below are some features.
- It uses a reservation system that keeps the customers engaged by making the website more attractive and including offers they cannot avoid.
- It lets your business connect to the online retail section, where you can attract direct customers and clients to enhance your profits.
- It lets the customers provide their email addresses so you can connect with them and send personalized messages with the newsletter.
- It provides the safest payment gateways to be included within your website to gain customers’ trust so they can make purchases.
6. Woopra
Woopra is another tool to leverage real-time analytics, such as tracking, that can even leave google analytics behind. You can also use it as a desktop application that will consistently provide you with live customers’ stats, such as where they are from, what pages they are accessing, and other related information. You can connect with those customers in real-time to understand their feedback and improve their experience accordingly. Below are other features.
- It lets you seamlessly track and analyze the data from across the products.
- It provides more than 50 integrations for easy working and additional functionality.
- It generates a detailed analytics report for understanding customers’ behavior.
- You can take real-time actions based on your customer’s activity.
- Also, you can create a personalized experience for our customers.
7. Mint
It is a self-hosted web analytics tool that provides real-time stats that might be paid with Google Analytics. It lets you track your website’s visitors, their source, and what pages they are viewing. And Peppermill, a part of Mint, lets you make the desired changes to your website with the help of several add-ons to improve the overall outlook of your website to keep your visitor engaged.
- It lets you organize the customers based on their website’s activity from the past day, week, month, and year.
- It lets you filter out referrals from popular search engines and group them as web or image search results.
- It is Easy-to-install with a simple procedure.
8. Chartbeat
This web analytics tool lets the business get the most from their data with real-time information. It helps businesses keep a constant watch on their visitors to understand what they are doing on their website. Businesses can make the necessary changes to improve their experience based on the gathered data. Below are other features.
- This tool allows you to monitor, optimize, and measure the customer’s behavior.
- It provides real-time data streamed through your system.
- It offers several add-ons for additional functionalities that will help you improve the website’s performance seamlessly.
- It has an advanced reporting system that will gather and compile the data gathered into simple reports for better understanding and making decisions.
9. Hotjar
With this web analytics tool, you can quickly gather actionable feedback from users other than the data from heatmaps and visitor data recordings. It offers the polls system, surveys, and live feedback with its live-chat facility, where you can work on customers’ queries and help them with their issues instantly. It is one of the essential features of Hotjar other than its fantastic user experience. You might not be able to use the A/B testing facility but can monitor pre-existing A/B tests. Below are other features.
- It uses heatmaps to analyze the customer’s live behavior to understand their interaction with the website.
- You can get valuable feedback from the customers for creating a more customized experience.
- You can integrate this tool with other tools and add-ons.
- It lets you record the live sessions to understand the entire customer’s journey from their entry to exit.
- It comes with several survey templates that you can use for your website directly.
10. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an all-rounder social media management platform, making it one of the fantastic web analytics tools. It lets you schedule and publish social media posts and monitor how your social marketing campaign turns out to bring traffic to your website. It helps your business keep track of the potential keywords and hashtags, analyze your customer base, and drive more traffic.
Also, it lets you compare the performance of your website on social media. Below are other features.
- It helps you understand the latest market trends and valuable insights from social data to plan a strategy for new changes.
- It lets you automate manual tasks so the team can focus on a more critical task.
- It provides the customer with a personalized experience to strengthen the customer relationship.
Criteria to select an effective Web Analytics Tools
Below are some criteria you can consider while choosing the web analytics tool. Each business has different requirements and customer bases; thus, they might require different tools as per their requirement. So, consider the below factors once before you stick to one web analytics tool.
- Business goals
Everyone wants their business to grow and adapt the latest techniques to perform better. Thus the web analytics tool must be compatible with the existing and future-ready website. It might be possible that your business goals change with time, so the tool must be able to achieve those goals with time and lets you modify your website whenever required as per the customer’s interest.
- Cost
Cost is one of the factors that can influence your decision. Businesses have already invested much in designing, creating, and hosting the website, and another cost can be unbearable for small businesses. For some businesses, there are budget constraints, so it must be customizable to cater to the needs of all business types. It lets the business decide which services they want in their plan, and the cost will be decided based on those services to enhance the tool’s flexibility.
- Advanced analytics
It is a modern world where creating new technologies is easy, but making your tools and systems ready for those changes can be challenging. Sometimes having a few analytics options might get outdated with time. Most businesses prefer those tools that can handle the scaling business requirements. Also, when the business grows, the data grows with it. So the tools must have the advanced analytics to gather data and generate results as per the changing needs.
- Integration
Most time, web analytics tools cannot provide enough facilities and functionalities. But, seamless integration with other tools and applications can increase their reach of performing several tasks. So make sure that your choice of web analytics tool can easily support integration with other tools.
- Customization
Also, another essential factor to consider is customization. With a web analytics tool, you must be able to tailor the website depending on the interest of their customers. You can set different metrics while generating the reports and have specific data required by the management. The freedom of customization makes a web analytics tool preferred more than other alternatives.
Conclusion
Without proper analytics, no website can grow in outlook and experience. If you fail to manage a fantastic experience for your customers, you might not be able to achieve your goals. So, gathering insights into your customer’s behavior is becoming more and more critical with time. Web analytics tools help you get those data, allowing you to make the required changes to your website and improve sales.
Web analytics tools offer several facilities to generate accurate results to make your work easier. Such results lead to more informed decisions that will bring more traffic. We have listed some web analytics tools for you to consider. So why wait? Get your website updated.
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.
