What is Web Analytics And Why It Matters?

In the digital world, the most basic building block for your business is a website.

Your website is the portal through which your audience can get a sneak peek into your company. It’s not just used to contact you but also for product inquiries, to find relevant content, and more.

A website is thus one of the most important digital marketing tools available for brands.

So, there is no point of having an elegant website, while you can’t extract prominent data from it.

It’s like walking in a well-furnished room with your eyes closed.

That’s where the point of having web analytics rises. Opt for web analytics so to have a roadmap of your online activities and achievements.

Web analytics delivers engagement and information to your audience to get insights and data.

It’s now the big data era, among the most valuable tool your business should never ignore is “information”.

Thus, if web analytics is well implemented can bring a huge difference to your business’s bottom line.

WHAT IS WEB ANALYTICS

Are you confused on what is web analytics?

According to Wikipedia, web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage.

Web Analytics is an important tool for success today. It is one of the most used drivers of long-term business growth. Since web analytics helps business leaders and owners by pointing out problem areas that can improve to speed up lead conversion.

Website analytics give insight into the changes that will work best for enhancing the performance of your website.

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.

🔥🔥🔥TIP TO NOTE: The worthiness of your website relies on data which gives out insights on your website visitors.

WHY WEB ANALYTICS IS NECESSARY IN DIGITAL MARKETING

With website analytics, you can accurately track the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns and helps to inform future efforts.

Website analytics provides insights and data that can be used to create a better user experience for website visitors.

For example, web analytics will show you the most popular pages on your website. Also the most popular paths taken by users to reach your website.

Helps to measure online traffic

Knowing the sources users take to reach your website is crucial. Examples to reach your website are; blog posts, social media posts, search engine such as Google, Bing etc.

Tracking the sources of traffic is very important in web analytics.

Web Analytics gives you an insight on the traffic as follows:

• The number of users and visitors on your website at a given time.
• Time they spent on your website.
• Where do they come from?
• What they are doing on your website.

Traffic can be of two ways organic and paid traffic.

Organic traffic is attained by users reaching your website through keyword or phrase searching.

Paid traffic involves users reaching your website through paid advertisements.

Thus, analytics tracks how organic and paid has been developing over time in real-time. This will help your business to make proper investment on time and money.

Tracking and optimizing of digital marketing campaigns

Campaigns include activities such as email marketing, paid social media ads, or paid search ads. Anything that involves a link whereby a user can click on that directs them to your website.

Different marketing campaigns will have unique and specific links which can be tracked. Tracked links will provide you with details on how users have received marketing campaigns. They also give a clue on how the campaign was profitable.

For instance, you have an eCommerce site, your goal is to achieve new customers. Among the strategies you came up with is to design social media campaigns. The web analytic reports of the campaigns will give you highlight where to allocate most of your energy.

Tracking business goals online

Every page on the website has its worth. Goal is to identify pages which are more important to invest in.

For instance, privacy policy page is not important to rely on.

For example, you are selling bags online, and your selling niche is in Tanzania. The most visited pages in this situation will be product page and pages used for actual purchase, compared to other pages.

Thus, the job of web analytic tools is to give the overview of website pages. Your task is to ensure that your page goals are meeting your user needs.
 

Helps to understand audience

Understanding your audience is the best way to learn more about your own website. Also which aspects you are doing good, and which ones you should improve.

Web analytics has the power to give valuable insights about customer’s behaviors. Where they come from and how they got to know about your website.

To identify your audience, answering some important questions such as:

• Where do you expect most of your audience to come from?
• Is your website visited frequently by those who click a link in a personal email?
• Were they referred by a website?
• Did they leave your website abruptly or was an action completed?
• What keywords and phrases were used to look for your URL?
• Are visitors being directed to your website from sites that are B2B or B2C?

If your analysis findings aren’t capturing your audience’s attention, you either have the wrong numbers or the wrong audience”.

Helps to put ideas and actions into perspective

Since businesses have increased their spending on online marketing, Web Analytics has become even more important on business growth.

Web analytics can act as a microscope to figure out one or two of the following aspects:

• How to increase conversions?
• Which websites refer the most traffic to your pages?
• Which parts of the website are not delivering as expected?
• Is there room for improvement on your website?

These opportunities could potentially be seeds for growth internally and organically.

For example, a new written article that brings more organic traffic compared to the rest of the site. Knowing this early on could shift your marketing efforts into a more profitable path.

Web analytics in digital marketing is very important since it integrates the web metrics into your marketing strategies.

🌐🌐🌐 ADVICE TO MARKETERS: The web analytics report could be much prominent to make evaluations on leads to turn them into customers.

How to Measure Web Analytics Metrics?

Web Analytics Metrics are measurement standards used to estimate the performance of a website

A metric on its own may be indecisive, but when put together, the results of multiple metrics can give a complete picture of web performance.

Let’s have a grip on what are the prominent web analytics metrics for your website.

Pageviews

As the name suggests, the number of times your website’s pages have been viewed by people visiting your site.

This metric can be a spotlight and allows you to access the performance of the content on that page.

For example, let say one of your aligned goals is to drive website traffic. One of the metric you could consider to check is Pageviews.

Knowing which pages are the most viewed is particularly useful for websites where you are always adding and updating content.

By learning what your top content is, and connecting the dots to find patterns between them, you are able to begin focusing on certain topics. The topics you know they resonate with your audience.

Content creation becomes less of a guessing game and more attuned to the needs and wants of your customers.

Bounce rate and exit rate

Bounce rate represents the number of people who visit your website, but leave immediately. This action is completed even before the page is loaded completely.

Among the factors to consider as a web developer is to ensure speed of your website and user design.

The exit rate metric shows the analyst which pages people exit from. This data is essential for planning marketing and promotional campaigns. Exit rate is directly linked to the bounce rate metric.

Conversion rate

This is a ratio of people who take action within a website after landing to your website.

It’s an important metric which can help to plan your business model.

A low conversion rate means even if you are attracting traffic, but your website is unable to generate worthy actions.
 

Traffic metrics

There are two types of traffic metrics.

Referring sites

Referring sites are those web pages that tell a visitor about your website. These online destinations ‘refer’ your website to visitors. Knowing this metric opens up a lot of opportunities. As it tells you the kind of websites you are referred on and the type of visitors you are getting.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is the opposite of site referrals. It reveals the number of people who direct visit a website, without first landing on a referral site.
 

Keywords used

Understanding the keywords used to search for your website, tells a business owner what customers are looking for.

Bounce rate and keywords allow a webmaster to see how effective landing pages were in attracting users to the website.

And how long do they stay on the page if their search criterion is fulfilled.

📈📈📈 TIP TO ANALYST: Plan your website goals and align them with the targeted metrics.

There is tremendous growth opportunity for a business that uses web analytics to identify its visitors and customers. Since it reveals information that would otherwise be hard to get. Once, you have adequate information about your audience and keywords they use to find you. Making changes to a website to increase its efficiency becomes an easy process.

Now, Let’s take a look on Website Analytic tools.

Website Analytics tools

Web analytic tools are very important in obtaining data about website performance. There are many tools with complex purposes for tracking anything online.

Here are some of the tools you can explore to meet your metrics.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

It’s a free analytic tool developed by Goggle.

According to the research done by the Hotjar.com 74% of the 2000+ analytics professionals surveyed use Google Analytics.

Did that surprise you?

Maybe not. Because at least thirty million websites using Google Analytics according to Built-With.

Google Analytics helps you collect, analyze, and report on website traffic data.

Among the things you can focus on are;

• Compare conversion rate of traffic from paid ad, social media, and search engine traffic
• Find landing pages with the highest drop-off rates
• Determine which pages have the biggest impact on your goals. For example, high-traffic pages where customers go before either converting or leaving
• Determine which country/market has the highest conversion rate
• Discover which landing page has the best/worst conversion rate
• Determine which product purchases result in the most return business, in which market

HOTJAR

Hotjar is behavior analytics software for any business selling online. It’s designed to help you:

• See how people interact with your website
• Investigate whether visitors encounter problems or issues in their journey
• Collect direct feedback from customers about your website experience

CRAZY EGG

It’s a website optimization tool.

• You can identify whether or not website visitors are tracking with your ideal website or customer journey.
• You’ll know which elements on a given web page of your website visitors interact with. Also how it changes across different segments of visitors.
• You can tease out how visitors are engaging to a particular page. Also learn key details about where they came from and they share visitor characteristics.

Different visitor tracking reports include:

• Heatmaps: show you where, and at what frequency, visitors are clicking on a given web page.
• Scrollmaps: show you how far down the page users scroll before they leave the page.
• Confetti Report: enables you to dig into your click data, showing how it varies across up to 22 different visitor characteristics.
• Overlay Report: shows that same breakdown of user behavior across 22 dimensions. Including custom dimensions for each clickable element on a given page.
• List Reports: emphasizes numbers over visuals. You’ll see a breakdown of how many visitors click on a given page element (including pop-ups and other moving elements).

SIMILARWEB

Do you check on your competitor?

It’s obvious YES you do.

SimilarWeb is our top pick for when you need to analyze your competitors’ websites to see how yours stacks up.

With it, you can uncover your competitors’ analytics and digital marketing strategy, including:

• Total visits
• Website traffic share
• Key engagement metrics

You can also set intelligent, informed benchmarks for your own website based on the performance of your competitors.

There is a lot that experts can do with the analysis data. To bring improvements and make a difference to the workings of a business and its website.

😊😊😊YOU ARE LUCKY: You need a team of professionals like Bridging Technologies Limited (BTL), who can lift up your goals on website. There is a good chance that they have all the tools necessary for website analytics. BTL gives Website Analytics services in Tanzania. It has a team that have experience required to use the tools to yield accurate results from the analysis.

THINK BIG AND ACT

Web analytics is an ongoing procedure, not a onetime exercise. Even when a website is up and running in its new form, it needs regular monitoring and maintenance so that the entire process is worthwhile in the long run.

Your website is quite powerful. To unveil the power, you need web analytics to grasp its potential, from tracking the marketing campaign to full web analytics report. Bridging Technologies is here to help just schedule a meeting today.

Suppose you can’t handle all the complex and overwhelming issues by yourself. Take a deep breath and take your phone and check on us.