When you are running a business, you need to collect as much data about your business operations as possible. Not only operational data, but companies also record data regarding their efficiency, the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, etc. to improve their online marketing. And web analytics is the best way to measure that data. With web analysis, you can calculate the ROI of your online business and also identify the budgets allocated to your marketing team. You can understand how your marketing team is performing in bringing leads and converting them into revenues. This post talks about what web analytics is and what benefits it delivers.
What is Web Analytics? How Does it Work?
What is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is also known as online analytics which helps you measure the data of your website so that you can understand how optimized your webpage is. By measuring the data of your website, you can understand how a particular audience is behaving on a particular web page. Analytics refers to measuring the activities and behavior of the visitors and users that are regular or new to your website.
With web analytics, you can determine how many visitors have visited a particular web page, how long they are staying on that webpage, how many pages they have visited on your website, which webpage is mostly visited by those users, and how they come to know about your website or webpage. By analyzing these data, you can understand how your website is performing and you will also be able to find the key metrics on which your business is depending for success.
By implementing web analytics on your website, you can get detailed information regarding the following issues:
- Detailed data composition among visitor data, referral data, and affiliate data.
- Data regarding how much traffic your website has received in a specific period.
- Data regarding search engines.
- Data regarding your website’s navigation patterns.
When you are performing web analytics on your online business, you are helping your company to serve your customers better and at the same time, advancing your business opportunities. Web analytics is possible by utilizing different analytics mechanisms such as Google Analytics, Optimizely, etc. And these tools can also help you perform the two kinds of web analytics.
Types of Web Analytics
There is an onsite web analysis and an offside web analysis. Onsite web analysis measures the visitor’s behavior when the visitor is on your website. Onsite web analysis measures the arrangement of your website. And offside web analysis measures if you are maintaining and owning the website which involves measuring the visibility, target audience, and comments on your web pages.
1. Metrics of Web Analytics
When it comes to web analytics, online tools measure your website data with three basic metrics. One is Count, the other one is Ratio, and the other one is a Key Performance Indicator or KPI. The count is the most common measurement metric for web analytics that displays the entire number of fractions:
Number of visitors = 10000, Number of likes = 200, etc.
Entire sales of products= $55,606.60
The Ratio is also a count but is separated by some other Counts such as page views per user. And key performance indicators are applied depending on the type and strategy your business uses. Therefore, key performance indicators deviate from one enterprise to another. When you are utilizing an online tool to measure the data of your website, there can be two levels that will allow you to understand the data insights. There is a micro-level analysis and macro-level analysis in Google Analytics.
Micro-level analysis tells about a user or a group of users. For example, how many times your customers have ordered a particular product or the number of times the customers have clicked on your certain webpage. The macro-level analysis is focused on the business objectives of your company and it typically involves a large group of users like a community or a country. For example, macro-level analysis involves counting the number of conversions you have received from a specific area.
When it comes to web analytics, you will have to understand the data that you have to measure on your website that will help you with your success.
What Do You Measure with Web Analytics?
Here are some of the types of data that you can measure with web analytics:
1. Engagement Rate
The engagement rate will allow you to see how long people are staying on your website or a particular web page. It will also help you see the pages that a particular customer or visitor is browsing on your website. And this information will help you evolve your pages into more interesting and add more informative content as well as visuals to boost your customer engagement rate.
2. Bounce Rate
If a user leaves your website within 30 seconds, then it will be regarded as a bounce rate. Bounce rate increases when the users don’t discover what they are looking for on your site and it hurts your search engine ranking. Over time, your bounce rate will automatically reduce when you publish more engaging content. However, if a user only reads on your blog and does not make any move or perform any action, then it will also be counted as a bounce rate.
In that case, you will have to add clear call-to-action buttons and backlinks on your web pages that will reduce your website’s bounce rate.
3. Dashboard
A dashboard is a page view where you can display information that your users would like. You can create dashboards on your own and for that, you will have to remember the requirements of your website. For example, you can add the data or posts or content that your users have viewed mostly on your dashboard.
4. Traffic Sources
Web analytics allow you to know where your users or visitors come from. There is a filter option that helps you figure out the particular areas where you are receiving visitors from. And when you know the traffic resources then you can improve your marketing strategy or promotion for further reach.
5. Tracking of Events
With tracking of events or events tracking, you can track the activities that you and your visitors perform on your website. This involves downloading your content or videos and how many people who visit your site are opting for your newsletter.
6. Page Load Time
Your page load time needs to be faster to create customer engagement. The slower your website, the more the bounce rate will be. With the help of web analytics, you will be able to know if your website and the web pages load slow or fast.
7. Conversions
With analytics, you can track your goals and the strategies that you use to achieve those goals. It will show you insights into your product’s performance, how many people have purchased a certain product, and their most preferred mode of billing. However, with web analytics, you can analyze many other things.
8. Content
The content that you publish on your website, you can analyze with Google Analytics or Optimizely, or any other web analytic tool. The benefit of doing so is to know how certain pages are performing on your website, how fast or slow they are loading on your users’ browsers, etc.
9. Flow of Users
The flow of users or visitors flow is about understanding how your navigation is working. Web analytics helps you to understand how many pages a visitor has visited and how well he was able to navigate from your navigation menu. If there is a problem on your navigation menu, then you can easily resolve it to increase your customer engagement.
10. The Behavior of the Visitors
With web analytics behavior and analyses, you can see how many page views you have and the average time spent on your website by users. In short, you will find out how your users act when they see your website.
11. Annotations
Annotations show you traffic reports of the past months or a certain period. Annotations come in graphs that you can download for your future references.
While you are using web analysis for measuring these data, you must also know the importance of doing so.
Importance of Web Analytics
Web analysis is important if you want to make your business successful. It will help you understand your visitors’ behaviors and by using those insights, you can enhance the performance of your online business. For example, nowadays the majority of users visit websites on their smartphones. That’s why website proprietors need to make their websites mobile-friendly.
With web analytics, you can create SEO-optimized content, and you can investigate your blog posts and the top viewed posts to learn what kind of content and topics your audience is finding the most helpful. You will find out the most successful traffic sources and invest your effort and energy to find more valuable traffic from those sources. For example, if you see that your social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram are driving more traffic to your website, then you might also consider running paid marketing campaigns on those channels to find more relevant visitors.
Conclusion
It does not matter what classification of company you are running online. It can be a small business, a startup business, an eCommerce website, or even a renowned company. With web analytics, you will find more purpose in your website because it helps you grow. You can collect, report, and analyze the data regarding your website and use those insights to improve user experience. At the end of the day, you will be able to create more conversions.
Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
