Web analytics metrics
Traffic, users, rankings, return on investment (ROI). Cross over your head and you are trying to figure out how they can work for your website and business.
Don’t Panic. The answer is so simple to tackle all of your problems.
Did you guess what is it?
Its web metrics right.
Before we deep dive into what web metrics are.
I would like you to think about these simple questions first:
- Do you have a well-designed website? If not, have a look on this post 3 web design tactics that will help you win in 2021
- Have you installed analytics on your site?
- Do you know what is web analytics and why it matters for your business?
If the above questions imply ‘’NO’’ as your answers.
It doesn’t mean you are lost; we are together.
You can take a look at what is web analytics and why it matters to have more insights on your website.
Ok, Let’s keep on moving on what is web analytics metrics?
Here is how web analytics metrics is defined by Investopedia
Web analytics metrics refer to varieties of measurements made on a given website to better track its performance and statistics.
Tracking these numbers is quite vital and important to measure your website performance.
Businesses that monitor and track their digital marketing strategies have a great chance of succeeding rather than the ones walking in the dark.
They say numbers don’t lie.
Let’s check on the stats of web analytics on various websites in Tanzania
According to built-with more than 5000 websites are installed with analytics and tracking detection.
46 percent installed Google Analytics followed by other software such as Microsoft Application Insights.
🔥🔥🔥TIP: Marketers care about sales, Analysts focus on data. And the business owners cry for the revenues. The goal is to adopt web metrics to identify your roadmap to success.
Why web metrics are important for your website
Before giving out the beauty of monitoring your website generally.
There are some important issues to take note of:
- Understand your website funnel
When I say website funnel, I mean the type of business your website is oriented.
Website funnels are of three main types which are:
- A blog website
- A lead generating website
- An E-commerce website
These kinds of websites go hand in hand with your website goals.
To make everything clear. Let’s explore quickly each of the above website funnels:
A blog website; Is a website that involves designing and publishing blog posts.
For example, you want to teach people how to cook various international recipes.
Your website funnel will be a blog website to fulfill your online goals.
Lead generating website; This kind of website involves showcasing your services to the internet using a website to generate leads and then sales.
For example; Bridging Technologies as the digital marketing agency among the services it offers is website analytics
The website type will be of lead generating website to showcase your services such as web analytics services in Tanzania to your audience.
E-commerce website; This kind of website involves the selling of products online.
For example, your online goal is to sell bags in Tanzania.
The website type to be used to reach your online goals will be an e-commerce website.
For example, you want to sell books online. The website funnel you will opt for will be an e-commerce website.
Am sure know you have a glimpse of what I meant that you should understand your website funnel.
Do you think focusing on web metrics is critical for your overall business?
Yes, it’s important. To mention a few of them as follows:
Helps to strategize contents that yield better results
Strategy! Strategy! Strategy!
Do you have strategies for your website?
If yes, it’s well and good.
Your web contents are your wealth on the internet world.
The blog posts, the images, the infographics do make noise on the internet on what you are doing in the real world.
Having analytics that controls your website in a variety of aspects such as;
- Which kind of contents drive users to your website
- How much time do they spend on certain pages?
- How many visitors you have daily, monthly, and annually?
So, having full control of the web analytics metrics of your website is worth it right?
Then, the best digital marketing agency in Tanzania which can handle all the tiresome issues is here for you.
Helps in decision making
Who in 2021 does make decisions without statistics?
Hope you aren’t among them.
Since your website is almost everything in the digital atmosphere. One thing to never ignore is website analytics metrics what it tells. Besides, you need to choose wisely the web metrics tool for controlling your website.
- You need to be curious about the website traffic you are attaining.
- Your audience’s location
- Where your marketing campaigns and efforts should monetize.
Elevating website performance
The web metrics tool you have decided to opt for will give you basic highlights on issues such as bounce rates. That tells how long do people stay on your website and leave.
If people just leave suddenly may be due to certain issues such as slow loading time, broken links, bad first impression i.e., poor website architecture, etc.
Thus, it will help web developers to have room for creating better improvements.
Measuring and controlling the marketing campaigns
The important thing about digital marketing unlike traditional marketing, is you can track and measure the marketing campaigns.
For instance, you have an online education platform, and you decide to initiate email marketing campaigns as a strategy to increase the number of readers, who can sign up for your newsletter.
This campaign can be easily measured using the analytics metrics tool of your website.
To have an insight on how well the campaign has performed.
With these spectacular reasons in mind, you should make sure your website is tactically designed, content-rich, and SEO friendly.
The good news is that I will not only give you the advantages of having control of a website.
Instead, I will also share with you the secrets on which web metrics to use.
Get A Free Website SEO Audit Now
Domain Authority, Crawlerbility, Inbound links, Errors, Warnings and Notices
11 most powerful metrics to measure
Today, I would like to introduce you to the web analytics metrics which can control the overall performance of your website.
There is no doubt that Google Analytics remains to be the granddaddy and leading light of website analytics as a tool.
On this article we will look at Google Analytics as the web metrics tool.
To make everything on a clear baseline, I will divide the metrics into three categories which are;
- Audience metrics
- Behavior metrics
- Traffic metrics
Audience metrics
As the saying states, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” W. Edwards Deming
Monitoring your audience is the key to your website performance.
It gives you the clues of what, where, and when your customers are and what they are doing.
You need to take action now.
The following metrics are considered to control the user/audience on the website.
- Pageviews and Unique Page Views
- Users and sessions
- Bounce rates and exit rates
Pageviews
According to Google Analytics Support center, a pageview is an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser.
Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed.
As the name suggests, and how the definition is elaborated by Google Analytics center.
Let’s feed our brains on understanding more on Pageviews.
A single Pageview can be;
- Loading of a page.
- Reloading of a page
- Navigating from the respective page to another page.
For example, one user may perform both of the three acts such as may enter at the homepage of Bridging Technologies’ website (loading of the page) then will reload the page (refreshing the page), and then move to the services page (navigating to another page).
This person will be counted with a total of three (3) pageviews.
Pageviews is an important web metric by itself but it can yield better results when combined with other data.
Unique Pageviews
It shows the number of visits to a web page during the whole session.
Considering the above scenario, unique pageviews of the homepage will be 1.
To make it simple,
Unique pageviews: shows the total number of users who visited a certain page within a session (24hours period) While Pageviews shows the total number of times a page was viewed during the session (24 hrs. period)
Users
User: is a distinct person, or, more accurately, a distinct ClientID identified in Google Analytics. Including you reading this article on this Bridging Technologies site. If it happens you visit this site with the same device and browser you are using now Google Analytics terms you as the same user.
In Google Analytics, users are categorized into two ways:
- New users
- Returning users
New users are the users who have never been before on your website. Whereby Google Analytics assigns them a unique ID.
Returning users are the users who have visited your website before.
Now, new and returning users are differentiated from the IDs subjected to users.
🔥🚀TIP: New user metrics will help you to identify how many new visitors you have obtained from your marketing campaigns and how well they performed in driving users.
Returning user metrics will help to understand your existing users how well do they engage with your blog posts publication or any updates from your website.
SESSION: represents a single visit to your website.
A single session can include many pageviews upon one user.
A session can end if a user has not interacted with the site for 30 minutes.
If a user is browsing the site by 11:59 pm and reaches 12:00 am (midnight) a new session is generated.
These are counted at 2 different sessions depending on the time zone.
Let’s clarify by giving an example,
Zahra visits the Bridging Technologies site to read articles on digital marketing, she read two articles. By 1:00 pm she heads on for break after 2:00 pm she finished another article. All of the activities she did on the same laptop and browser and she didn’t clear cookies.
Bridging Technologies Google Analytics will have this record.
1 user: Zahra
2 sessions: The first session of reading articles before the break. The second session is recorded after the break which recorded due to the least minutes of inactivity during the break.
4 Pageviews:
- 1: She visited Bridging Technologies site
- 2: She navigated reading the two articles
- 1: The last pageview of finishing the article after the break.
It counts to a total of 4 pageviews made by Zahra after visiting Bridging Technologies.
Bounce rates
The official definition by Google
Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.
Did you get the point?
It simply says Bounce rate is a percentage that shows how many people landed on the page and left the website without interacting with it.
Bounce rates are only calculated on the landing pages.
A landing page could be any page on your website where a visitor gets directed to.
For example, a user types in Google search “The best web analytics services in Tanzania”. Google directs the user to the Bridging Technologies website under the services page of website analytics.
So, the web analytics services page is the landing page.
If it happens that the user visits the services page and didn’t head further to other pages. That’s termed as “Bounce rate”.
Bounce rates can be high or low.
A bounce rate to be high or low depends on various factors;
- The type of page such as FAQ page where the visitor only gets answers on the specific question he or she asked. On this page bounce rates may be high and it’s not a problem.
- A page that acts as a doorway to other pages for instance homepage. Acts as a path to other pages such as a blog, services page, etc. In this case to this page if there is a high bounce rate it’s a problem.
EXIT RATE
The exit rate is the percentage of people that exited the website from a particular page.
Bounce rate is when a user visited a certain page and left without interacting with the page, while an exit rate shows the page which the user left the website, accompanied by several pageviews.
Behavior metrics
Behavior metrics show and elaborates on how users engage with your website.
Using Google Analytics as the master tool,
Behavior metrics of the site are as follows;
Landing pages
There is a quote state that “Trust is built on the first impression”
A landing page; Is the first page to be viewed by the user when visiting your site.
Note the top ten landing pages of your site.
These are the pages most of the viewers are interested in while visiting your site.
Keep in mind that these pages which influence your visitor to continue navigating throughout your website are the golden key to reach the main goal
Top queries in Search
This is a metric that shows what are your visitors searching for to reach your website.
Google Analytics as a tool, shows queries which your audience uses to reach you.
For example; Most of our audience use the “Bridging Technologies” phrase to reach us.
🧑🏿🚀TIP: SEO experts should ensure proper keywords are aligned on their websites to track their ranking keywords.
Average time on Page
Is the average time a user spends on a page.
The prominent purpose of this metric reflects which type of your content is good or bad.
Pages that are properly designed, allowing a user to navigate throughout the page.
It helps to understand how good the user experience is and how well your marketing campaigns are targeting relevant customers.
TRAFFIC METRICS
As a digital marketer are you interested in knowing how many people visit your website?
It’s obvious, you are anxious to know how many users you have and which paths they take to reach you.
Here are the metrics to have highlights on your website traffic.
- Traffic sources
These are the channels users take to reach your website.
Google Analytics shows the sources of the traffic as follows;
- Direct traffics; this involves users typing your website directly on the browser
- Organic traffic; this kind of traffic is when visitors reach you after doing an organic search
- Social traffic; this traffic is from social networks such as LinkedIn
- Referral traffic; it’s traffic from another website.
Do you want to know how effective your SEO strategies are?
The organic traffic source is the answer.
If it happens that high website traffic you achieve is from organic searches. It simply means you are on the right track. But if it's otherwise then Bridging Technologies is not far from where you are, it’s always there to shine you up on your SEO practices.
ARE YOU THINKING ON HOW TO ANALYSE YOUR WEBSITE?
Trust me, having a website to reach a level of perfection is not child’s play. It involves lots of hard work on the table but subjecting it to experts where they can properly handle your brand reputation is the best choice.
Planting a seed for the future is our motive. Seeing you grow as a brand is our frontline goal.
Be assured of your decisions and we are always available to help your business. As the best digital marketing agency in Tanzania.
Do you still have problems with your analytics? We offer the best web analytics services in Tanzania don’t hesitate to reach us.
About Author
A content writer filled with a desire to create engaging online content for innovative brands.
