Web Analytics is an important aspect of your website. Not only do you need to know if visitors are coming but where they’re coming from and what they’re doing on your site. These web data analytics tools will help you understand more about your visitors and how they interact with your site, which will help you make decisions on improving it in the future.
Did you know website analytics is the most important tool for your website? It’s true. With Google Analytics, you can track and measure every aspect of your website. You can track how much traffic you get on a daily basis, how many users your getting from different locations in the world, which pages perform best and so on…
Getting Started with Web Analytics – A Guide for Newbies
By Avantika MonnappaLast updated on Nov 11, 20213280
The most common reason for people to learn web analytics is to identify and fix problems with their websites. Perhaps you’re struggling to attribute sales on your e-commerce site to the right sources. Or you’ve noticed a spike in traffic but are not sure why.
Web analytics helps by providing an established set of processes & tools to capture, collate, & analyze data to deliver insights into website performance, user behaviour, and more.
Knowledge of analytics is thus important for any professionals working in the digital industry.
But where do you begin learning?
A great way to start would be to familiarize yourself with what the biggest names in the field are saying. Leading international thinkers with many thousands of followers are often able to influence thought on a global scale, placing them at the forefront of the wave of innovation. It pays to read what they have to say.
Here are a few popular influencers for you to follow –
1. Avinash Kaushik: The co-founder of Digital Marketing certification training provider Market Motive, and Digital Marketing evangelist for Google, Avinash is the go-to person for web analytics and digital marketing. He has been writing about web analytics on his blog Occam’s Razor and has also published a book on the subject Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0. It doesn’t matter which of his posts you pick out to read, there is something to learn every time.
2. Marshall Sponder: Marshall is an expert on web analytics and SEO/SEM. He writes on a both social media and web analytics. Having worked with companies like Monster and IBM on their web analytics, you can trust that Marshall knows what he is talking about.
3. Nathan Gilliatt: For business and executive leaders with no idea of the value of web analytics, this is a blog that will help you become a web analytics evangelist. He simplifies the complicated concepts in web analytics making it easy for anyone to learn from his blog.
Many influencers also maintain personal blogs where they share their insights & advice with an eager audience.
Here are a few web analytics blogs for your reading list –
1. Web Analytics land: Although this blog has been inactive since 2003, its exceptionally-rich archive is perhaps the best resource on Adobe Analytics on the web.
2. Usability Tools: If you are looking to learn more about the tools in web analytics, this blog is one you should definitely visit. With a collection of tool recommendations to use for both desktop and mobile, Usability Tools is a regular destination for UX experts & even designers, in addition to analytics professionals.
3. Data Set Go: If you are new to analytics, then this blog is one you should visit. It offers a rundown of the basics and lays the groundwork to help you build a strong foundation in web analytics.
If shadowing influencers seems like a great way to learn, how exciting would it be to learn from them – directly?
Many of the influential web analytics gurus regularly consult for e-learning companies and serve as faculty for popular certification training courses.
Here are a few web analytics certification providers with high-profile faculty developing the course content –
1. Market Motive: With Market Motive’s course in web analytics, you will gain domain knowledge and learn how to leverage data through web analytic tools and draw insights for business and marketing.
2. Analytics Academy: This provider offers training courses in web analytics as well as other data analysis tools. These courses are extremely helpful if you are looking to take up the Analytics Individual Qualification exam.
3. Simplilearn: Powered by Market Motive, Simplilearn also offers a course in Web Analytics. With 25+ hours of high-quality up-to-date eLearning content, downloadable workbooks and exercises, online progress quizzes, and practices tests, anyone looking to build their career in Web Analytics can take up this course.
Once you are done learning up about Web Analytics and have a bit of knowledge on the subject, there are tools that you can use to understand the behaviour of your website better.
Here are the most popular web analytics tools to help you hit the ground running –
1. Google Analytics: A godsend for bloggers & webmasters, Google Analytics is used to track and analyze data about web traffic. The tool allows users to check which keywords are bringing in the most visitors to pages and what aspects of the design are turning them off. A website report is generated which includes information about traffic sources, visitors, goals, e-commerce, and content.
2. Kissmetrics: Another popular analytics tool, Kissmetrics allows the website owner to track all the movements of the individual visitor across the website. While the tool allows you to observe and analyze changes in user-behavioral patterns over time, it also provides useful data on most-recent and typical referrers. The main feature of Kissmetrics is the ‘Timeline view’ that keeps a log of the visitor’s activity on the site in an easy-to-understand format.
3. Crazy Egg: This analytics tool uses heat-map technology to give website owners a visual picture of what the visitor is doing on the web page. It provides a visual map of the user’s movements and their interaction points on the page. This helps you identify locations that see the most activity – and why.
Can you think of any other great web analytics tools to use? Which web analytics thought leader do you swear by? Let us know in the comments below!
Check out our course on Introduction to Advanced Web Analytics Certification Training
There are a number of options available for web analytics tools. On the basis of the performance and popularity, we are listing the 7 most popular web analytics tools for you.
1. Google Analytics
It is one of the most popular analytics tools used to analyse the data. This tool tracks website activities such as pages per session, bounce rate, session durations. It also analyses the impact of marketing campaigns, products and content. When integrated with Google ads, users can create and review their online campaigns by tracking conversions and landing page quality. The tool provides real-time analytics for current visitors on the site. It is indeed the perfect place to begin if you are new to measuring web traffic.
2. Yahoo Web Analytics
Tendering a little more in-depth surveying, Yahoo Web Analytics Tool is a simpler approach to real-time data collection, customized options, visitor behaviour and demographics reports. This tool uses cookies (does not include PII) and web beacons for collecting data related to visitors. The collected data includes links clicked, advertisements viewed and the time spent on websites. This data helps in identifying changes in traffic patterns that can be implemented within marketing campaigns to make them effective. It is a bit different from Google in terms of customization, profiling and filtering. It is a perfect option for those who want to dig a little deeper.
3. Woopra
This is a real-time web analytics service used by organizations for optimizing customer life cycles. This is done by providing live granular behavioural data for website visitors and customers. Woopra feeds you with live visitor statistics including what pages are live and where on the website. This web analytics tool offers Trend Reports which help in identifying key metrics that change over time and attributes that drive performance. Businesses can also measure product usage through features, subscription changes via location and campaign performance by source. Besides this, you can also have live chat with website visitors.
4. Clicky
One of the most comprehensive tools in the market, Clicky monitors the website traffic, analyzes and then, react to it. It displays each individual visit and what they find interesting on the website. Clicky provides real-time data and is free for 3000 page views. There is no need to leave the website to launch heatmaps since it is possible through the widget. You can view heatmaps by segment, visitor and page. Website’s uptime is monitored from 7 different locations. You will be notified via an alert in case your site goes offline.
5. Kissmetrics
Another popular tool that enables clients to track the movement of visitors throughout their sites, Kissmetrics is a superb way to gather information and know the behaviours of individuals. Via Kissmentrics, you can track the complete customer journey across various devices. You can identify drop off points in the flow on the website. It also offers a “Timeline View” of visitor activity in a visual format. The tool is available in two variants: SAAS and E-commerce.
6. Crazy Egg
Offering you an image of where visitors are clicking on the site with the help of heatmap technology, Crazy Egg is best known for scouting the website’s usability. Crazy Egg is used by more than 300,000 websites. You can filter data on search terms, operating systems and on top 15 referrers. This web analytics tool provides in four different ways. These include:
- Heatmaps: The tool generates heatmaps based on the parts where visitors have clicked on the website.
- Scroll maps: You can track up to where the visitor has scrolled down on the page. This allows you to identify parts of the page that needs improvement.
- Confetti: Through this, you can identify the origin of clicks and in turn, the traffic source. You can also distinguish clicks segmented by search terms, referral sources, etc.
- Overlay tool: This provides you with an overlay report for the number of clicks on the website.
These are the best web analytics tools that you can choose from depending on your budget, industry and the time you can put into learning the tool.
Conclusion
Web analytics tools help you track how effective your efforts are and guide you towards making better decisions so that you can achieve better results. What works for me might not work for others and vice versa. Web analytics tools are no different than any other tool in this regard and it’s the simple truth that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to figuring out what tools work best to serve your needs. I broke down the ones that I feel would work best for someone just starting out, who has never used web analytics before and decided to write a short guide on how some of these tools can be put to use by beginners.We all know that analytics are a vital part of any marketing strategy, but they can be tricky to get your head round when you’re just starting out. That’s why we’ve put together this list of the best web analytics tools for beginners so you can have a helping hand in understanding your website traffic and conversions better.