What is web analytics and how to use it?

💡 Web analytics

It’s all about using the data you can collect from your website to give you insights about your business.

👉 Ｗhy need web analytics?

Web analytics can measure the performance of just about any kind of online marketing you decide to do. From search to display advertising, social to email, and everything in between.
Web analytics tools can tell you if the “conversion rate”, or the amount of people that visit and then convert on one of your goals, changes based on where they came from, whether they’d been there before, or even the type of device they’re using.

👉 Different types of data

Web analytics helps you by providing data.

Metric:

Metrics is basically anything you can count, such as “Unique Visitors” and “Time Spent On Site”. If you sell things on your website, you can track how much money you’re making or how many of a certain product you’re selling. If your goal is to get people to read your website, you can track the number of times someone looked at a blog article or the amount of time they spent on it. All of these things are “metrics.”

Conversion:

Web analytics tools can tell you if the “conversion rate”, or the amount of people that visit and then convert on one of your goals, changes based on where they came from, whether they had been there before, or even the type of device they’re using.

Dimensions:

Dimensions is any kind of data you can use to describe something you’re tracking with words. It includes things like the device type, what browsers visitors use, their geographic locations, and much, much more. By taking your metrics and “slicing” them with dimensions, you can find answers to very specific, detailed business questions.

🚩 TIPS:

How to find out which marketing campaigns are making the most sales?
Take your “Conversions” metric, and break it down by a “Campaign” dimension.

👉 How to get it started?

First, you’ll need to copy and paste some special code onto your web pages. You can find some specialists to do it for you.
Next, while these tools will track a lot of things on their own, you might want to configure them to track the specific things that are unique to your business and your goals.

🤓 Keep in mind

The power of analytics is that it can help a business measure what’s going on at every stage of that customer journey.

🚩 Example Tips from Google Digital Garage:

If you were looking for a accomodation for a trip you’ll be making 6 weeks from now, the first thing you might do is go online and search for a term like “Motel in Hamilton.” After you search, you end up on a search results page. And from there, you might spend some time clicking around on some websites that interest you. You’re in research mode.

Once you’re on a website, you might do a few things, like check out the rate. See what kinds of rooms are available. Browse some reviews and photos to get a better idea. At this point, you’re probably not ready to actually book a room - you’re still looking around. But you might decide that this one is on your short-list, and you might even sign up to receive email updates to make sure you don’t miss out on any promotions.

Now, 2 weeks later, an email shows up in your inbox offering 15% off the normal rate, for the same dates you were planning to travel!

👉 What Analytic Tools tell us

It can tell you if people are actually engaging with your business when they get to your website.
It can also measure whether people are converting on the goals you want to track.
It can tell us whether people are coming back and becoming repeat customers.
And when properly set up, analytics can even tell us if those loyal customers are becoming our advocates sharing our content with others on social networks?

🤔 You might ask
What is the best duration of time people spend on a website for a valuable visit?

The truth is we don’t know.

Just looking at stats like these really limits our ability to make any decisions. What we need is data that can very clearly show the value of these visits to the business. With that data you can start to really use your web analytics tool to show you things you can do to constantly improve. And you can adjust your advertising campaigns according to the data analysing.