What is the benefit of Web Analytics Tools for your website? If you are running a website, analytics tools can help you track if your site is growing and how well it is performing. These tools typically offer a host of stats that can help you monitor and measure traffic, explore demographics and interests, target ads and even track conversions as part of an overall marketing strategy.
One of the most important factors in your digital marketing strategy is data, without it you wouldn’t be able to measure and optimize your campaign’s performance. You can use a variety of tools to collect, analyze and interpret this data for digital marketing efforts, but there are a few tools that are industry-standard and required by most businesses. This article will help you understand what these tools are and why they’re vital to your success as a digital marketer.
Almost every website owner can agree that Web Analytics is one of the most important things when it comes to knowing how your business is doing. But despite all these benefits and measurement tools available, many people still find it hard to use the data Web Analytics provides to their advantage.
Here’s a little story that must be told
The (Un)Importance of Web Analytics
Up until some time in the past, at Brand24 we used to think that web analytics is a thing for huge companies and brands like Coca Cola. We had been entertaining this idea for quite some time and remained completely unaware of the advantages web analytics holds.
As CEO Mike says during his presentations, we sucked at analytics.
Even though, we were still growing.
One of our first cracks at web analytics other than Google Analytics was Heap. And it was groundbreaking for us.
Heap is a great user analytics tool. It records every single action performed by a visitor or user on a site. We see how she or he interacts with our site or product.
Thanks to it, we found a couple of places for improvements which gave us a boost.
After some time, we’ve realized that there were plenty of fuckups. It meant that the business which was growing at a steady pace could grow even a couple of times faster.
One of our most spectacular fuckups and oversights was our registration form.
Using Heap, we’ve discovered that almost 70% of visitors leaves our registration form!
That made us think and we came to certain conclusions:
- First of all, there were too many input fields that discouraged users from making a payment.
- Secondly, the discount code input caused many users to leave the page.
After some design changes, the number of trial users quadrupled:
Since then, we’ve found more fuckups and room for improvements. Since then, we’ve also been able to track the impact of product changes more thoroughly.
This is one of our stories of how we benefited from the advantages of web analytics. It proves that web analytics is for companies of all sizes.
They are an effective tool to track and monitor the impact of marketing, design, or product changes.
Regardless of the size of your organization, web analytics can give you plenty of insights connected to specific ares of your online presence: social media reach, online reputation, user experience, social media, web traffic and more.
As seen above, implementing web analytics tools can be a huge step forward for small and local businesses. The good things is that there’s plenty of web analytics tools that offer reasonable pricing plans for these small businesses.
Now let’s see other advantages of web analytics for small businesses.
How to Start With Web Analytics
To use any Web Analytics, you need to create an account there, which is an easy and simple job, and is also completely free. When your Web Analytics account is activated, you would get a small piece of code for embedding on your website’s every page. Once you install that code in your website, the Analytics would start collecting and tracking your valuable website data.
Advantages of Web Analytics for Small Businesses
The sooner a small business embraces web analytics, the better.
Detecting problems in the early stage of, for example, user journey will save money, resources and nerves later in the funnel. Another thing is that these 3% in the beginning of the journey will make a massive difference at its end.
To get the initial traction and customers, young and small companies need to embrace web analytics as soon as possible.
Web analytics comes helpful here in 4 main areas of an online business:
- Traffic and conversion.
- Social media performance.
- User behavior.
- Key progress indicators.
Major benefits of web analytics tools for business growth
Analyze the traffic of websites: Traffic is the most important metric to measure the performance of any website. It is very easy to track traffic to your website with the help of various web analytics tools. A good amount of traffic to any website specifies its growth; while, less traffic is a sign of the inactivity or decline of the website. It helps in planning the marketing campaigns consequently. Similarly, web analytics tools help track the repetitive, exclusive, and return visitors. If the number of repeat visitors is more, then it specifies that your website is positive in retaining visitors but isn’t doing well when it comes to appealing to new visitors. This can further help in developing new strategies to fetch attention of new eyes to your website. Request a demo to know more about our portfolio of analytics solutions.
- Ascertain the source of traffic: To know the source of your website traffic is one of the very significant factors to progress your website’s performance. Web analytics tools help in dividing traffic into groups like referral, organic, social, and direct. Organic is determined through a search engine and this helps you to understand the ranking of your website in the search engine. Referral traffic comes from a different website, which is either connected to your content or you have written a guest post on their website. Social traffic comes from many social media platforms through your posts that have been shared. This helps in understanding how appealing your posts on social networks are. Last but not the least, is direct traffic, which helps you classify how many people are directly typing the name of your website in their browser and landing on the page of your website. This is a sign of the loyal following of your website. Get in touch to know more about the major benefits of web analytics tools for business growth.
- Bounce rate tracking: Web analytics tools help you understand how many visitors are exiting your website instantly after arriving. Lower bounce rate specifies that your website is able to engage and occupy the visitors for a longer time. Bounce rate is different for different pages like blogs and landing pages. There are many reasons for high bounce rate like inappropriate keywords, slow loading of your website pages, broken links, inappropriate content, and many more.
Now days are gone where every prospect visits your business premise at first time, but they do visit your business website for sure.
Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
It is useful for any business with digital presence which can be either website or web portal – to analyze and measure the behavior of the visitors that come to their web presence. Such analytics measures things like what were number of visitors, source of visit, pages viewed, and actions taken on the site, as well as things like page views, time spent on page, sources of traffic and visitor demographics and many other. There are several metrics that measured using website analytics but it is important that marketers focus on those reports which fulfill their business objective. And based on their analysis marketers should take immediate action for better results.
For example if you are visiting our website www.GrassDew.com then I came to know even tiny details like which browser user has used to open website, from which city etc on mobile application without any efforts. Let me list few key benefits of adding analytics on website.
- Know your visitors
You can identify the geographical information of your website visitors. By discovering where your visitors are located, you can target the appropriate areas for your services or product marketing. This will help determine where it is best to invest your marketing time and budget.
2. Checkpoint on ROI of other marketing activities
As your marketing activities take off you will start to drive more traffic back to your website, causing your match rate to rise. When you have more companies recognised, more leads can be tracked in your analytics system, which in turn will provide more named leads and create more sales opportunities.
3. Know Customer Needs
With insights, you can see the levels of traffic and which are your most popular web pages. You can use this information to then tailor your sales pitch or update your web pages to convert more traffic.
4. Keep eye on Customers Being Loosed
A bounce is when a customer visits one page and then leaves without taking any further action or viewing any other pages. This can be clearly seen and broken down by times of day, so that you can see which pages they viewed and the time that they were there. Use this tool to improve your website user journey and help leads move further through their buying journey before getting in touch with them.
5. Find out how to optimise your website
See which device and which browser is being used to view your site. For example if people are using mobile device to open your website, it will be one input that you may need to develop mobile apps as target prospects are using more of mobile phones. Even this information tells better areas to be considered during redesigning of your website.
Google Analytics is a free tool that you can used to track information about the way visitors to your site interact with it. During a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you will need to use Google Analytics to track the performance of your keywords in order to have a successful campaign. You will be able to know how much traffic each of the keyword brings to your website. Google Analytics will open up a world of information you probably never knew about visitors on your site.
If your business already has website, our team can help you for configuring your web site with Google Analytics. Then you can just open mobile app, and see all analytics on mobile from anywhere.
Conclusion
The importance of collecting website analytics data is something that we all know about so there is little need for me to forge on about it. However, the next question then comes up – how exactly do you go about doing this? The good news is that there are now a number of tools and platforms which make website usability testing, customer behaviour tracking and market research a much simpler task than could have been achieved previously. Here are some of the many benefits associated with using web analytics tools.
After some time the website traffic grows and it becomes clear that the analytics software you used before is not powerful enough to satisfy your needs anymore. This happens to everyone at some point, especially if you already reached the point where visitor numbers increase more rapidly than before.