Basic web analytics is fundamental. And essential. Web analytics will help you understand the performance and weakness of your website, and then develop corresponding strategies to maximize your profit.
What you can do with web analytics? How many visitors are coming to your website in a certain period? Who they are? Why they came? How long they stayed on your site? What they did on your site? How can web analytics help you acquire new visitors and keep existing customers? Most importantly, how web analytics help you turn your visitors into sales?
To answer these questions, you need to know the basics of web analytics. Here are 7 essentials you need to know when implementing web analytics on your website.
1. Web analytics is to tie outcomes to profits
In these days online marketers are desperate to drive visitors to their websites through various online marketing strategies. However, having visitors to come to your website is only part of the overall competition. Smarter online marketers not only know how to attract visitors to their website, but also understand how to “convert” the visitors into customers. This is the real reason for the existence of websites that want to make money online.
To “convert” visitors into sales, online marketers need to collect data to analyze the behavior and trends of visitors to their website.
So the most fundamental thing you will do with web analytics is to tie outcomes to profits.
2. What web analytics can do
What benefits can you get from web analytics? Here are some basics things that you can benefit from web analytics.
- How many returning visitors and new visitors visit your website
- How many active users on your site in real time
- How many pageviews
- The geographic origin of visitors
- The most viewed page on your site
- Exit pages where visitors log off your website
- Average page load time
- The most common keywords used to search for your website
- Etc…
3. What web analytics can’t do
Web analytics can’t track data from individual users
Although web analytics tools like Google Analytics can track data that is aggregated, it can’t track personally identifiable information. For example, you can’t obtain data related to a certain person or your competitor. You don’t know whether they visit certain page or click on certain link.
Web analytics can’t guarantee your success
You can’t just simply start with using web analytics on your website and think great success is lying ahead of you. Web analytics cannot ensure our success online. It can only indicate the way in which we might best want to go.
4. Understand clickstream web metric
Web metrics are unique to each business. Which web metric should you aim to depend on the type of your business and what you want to achieve through your online business. For example, Conversion Rate metric is good for an e-commerce site. Visitor Loyalty metric is proper for a Facebook page. Depth of Visits metrics is perfect for a content site.
The metrics listed below are just some basic ones. Learning these fundamental metrics is a good start for those who just step into the world of web analytics.
- Sessions
- Unique visitors
- Time on page
- Time on site
- Bounce rates
- Exit rates
- Conversion rates
- Engagement
5. Choose the right web analytics tool
There are many both free and paid web analytics tools out there. It is unnecessary for you to use all of these tools all of the time. However, it’s useful to know about some of the top options and how they fit into your general web strategy.
In the resource page, I listed some of the best web analytics tools that are a great place to start.
6. Web analytics is the process of continuous improvement
Web analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing web data in order to understand user activity on a website and then implement strategies to optimize website usage.
After you complete this process, you have to start it all over again! To stay ahead of your competition, you have to continue to watch your conversions and adjust your objectives and metrics. By examining your data repeatedly you will be able to find the areas that need improvement to better maximize your profit.
In summery
Getting visitors to your website is one thing, but turning them into sales is different. You may have good traffic on your website, but your visitors are just not performing the way you want them to. They come and leave without delivering any value to your business. To convert your visitors into customers, you need to know these essentials of web analytics so that you can make your visitors take your desired action on your website.
