What a successful business needs, is to understand its customers. It is crucial to stay ahead of the competition and understand the changing trends among the customers. To achieve this, each enterprise needs the right tools. Web Analytics is one of the tools that provides businesses with all the data needed.
Web analytics are an integral part of any online marketing plan. Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data, in order to help you improve the effectiveness of your activities online. By using a web analytics tool to collect data, you’ll be able to know what is or isn’t working, and then steer your website in the right direction. Analytics platforms measure activity and behavior on a website, for example: how many users visit, how long they stay, how many pages they visit, which pages they visit, and whether they arrive by following a link or not.
A strong online presence is the key to the growth of an enterprise. Web analytics can help a business grow rapidly. Especially if you are a small enterprise, you must avoid mistakes that may have a negative impact to your business. The most important is that web analytics give you the opportunity to make well-informed decisions, by having accurate reports and data. It is easier to track and to find out what is wrong with your website and what you should do in order to improve it. Businesses that use web analytics tools stand a better chance to attract customers.
Five key metrics for web analytics
- Overall traffic: Web traffic is the total number of visits your site gets over a specific period of time. This number is significant, as it tells you if your website is getting the attention it deserves.
- Bounce rate: “Bounce” is when someone visits your site and leaves without viewing a second page. The percentage of those visits you get measured against your overall traffic, makes up your bounce rate. The higher the bounce rate, the worse off you are. This metric is important as it highlights whether there are problems with your website.
- Traffic sources: The pages that link to your site are your traffic sources and they usually are search engines, links from other sites, visits from email campaigns or links from social media.
- Desktop vs. mobile visits: Mobile traffic is fully adopted by many web users, so it’s essential for your website to offer a strong mobile experience. This metric allows you to track what percentage of users are visiting your site through desktop or mobile browsers and tells you where to focus your efforts.
- New and returning visitors: “Returning visitors” are those who keep coming back to your website over and over again and they are your core audience.
No matter if you have a small or a large enterprise, those data are useful to both types of businesses. Maybe for small enterprises are more crucial, as they are new to the market and they need those data, in order to grow successfully. When you start an enterprise, you want to take decisions with a positive impact and avoid as many risks as possible.
The most important thing is to know as much as possible about your customers, who they are and why they are visiting your website. Their age, their gender, their location, their familiarity with technology, the device they use to access your website, are all important aspects for you. If you know all the above, you will be able to understand the improvements that you have to make in order to target the audiences accurately and enhance user experience.
Another aspect that is useful for you and help you gain from the use of web analytics, is to know about the content of your website. The average duration on a page, the bounce rate for various pages, etc. are metrics that helps you understand what the viewers like reading and analyze the missing elements on other pages. You can make decisions on performing the right changes to the webpages, as you have a better insight into what customers prefer.
As we analyze above, search engine optimization (SEO) is a very critical element for the development of an enterprise, especially for small ones, in order to gain authenticity across search engine platforms. The organic traffic a business receives is a direct indication of the number of potential customers and conversions it generates. By getting insights into the demographics of the visitors, you are able to create targeted content that appeals to the audience.
Benefits of Web Analytics
- Measurement of online traffic
The analytics tracks how organic and paid traffic has been developing over time in real-time, and this will help you to invest time and money more effectively. Those data will help you to understand which activities bring profitability and which are not. - Tracking bounce rate
Bounce Rate is when a user who has visited the website leaves without interacting with it. When a website has a high bounce rate, it can not produce quality leads, sales, or any other conversions related to business. By tracking the bounce rate, you can improve the content of the website and increase its profitability. - Optimisation & tracking of marketing campaigns
For each campaign, a link is created, which can be tracked. This link provides you all the details you need about the campaign. By tracking the campaigns, you can invest more to those which are profitable and cancel those with low performance. - Finding of the right target audience
It is important for enterprises to find and address to the right target audience. Web analytics can provide them the information needed to find the right audience. Finding the right audience means that the campaigns will have a positive impact to customers and the profitability will be increased. - Improvement and optimisation of the website & web services
An enterprise which uses web analytics, can identify potential problems on its website or its services. It has the chance to offer a better experience to users and make them find the content they want the right time. - Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Websites can improve their conversion optimizations through the utilization of web analytics. The conversion rate is calculated when received goals are divided by the number of users. Every enterprise has to measure the conversions that it considers as important, as there are too many. The profitability of an enterprise is increasing when it improves the conversion rates with web analytics. - Tracking business goals
It is important for enterprises to create goals but it more important to be able to track those goals. By tracking the goals, you can react faster when it is needed and make the appropriate changes. - Improvement of the results from Google Ads and Facebook ads
Analytics play an important role on online advertisements. The data talks about the produced clicks, conversions, and how the ads have been received by the target audience. Those data help you to increase the results of the advertisements. - New Ideas
Data analysis allows you to learn about the trends, users’ experiences and find new opportunities for your business. If you take advantage those opportunities properly, can lead your business to growth.
Graphic 8. Importance of Web Analytics
The most popular web analytics tool is Google Analytics. This official tool gives access to all the metrics above, plus a whole lot more. Google Analytics provides real-time digital marketing reports and analytics for websites. It allows digital marketers to track and measure several key performance indicators that affect their online enterprise.
Google Analytics help you to shape the success strategy of your business. It is very important for you to learn the inner structure of your website to see whether it is achieving its purpose or not. What you need to know about Google Analytics is that it is a tool which provides you with important information, numbers, and statistics that you need to maximize your website’s performance for free. You do not have to pay anything in order to use this product and acquire your website’s data. Moreover, you do not have to do anything to collect data. Google Analytics can collect data from your website automatically and make reports accordingly, without any delay. Regarding the reports, it offers many options or you can even create one by yourself. Another remarkable feature of Google Analytics is that it can be easily integrated with other tools and platforms. Google Analytics can be integrated with Google Ads, fact that will lead to success through your AdWords campaigns.
