What is web analytics?
Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data. It provides you the ability to generate and review actual reports on how your site visitors behave once they are on your website. Providing data such as age, gender, location and much more. As well as showing the top landing pages on your site, total conversions, and where the traffic is coming from. Therefore by looking at the data of your visitors will help improve your website and business.
Getting to Know Your Visitors
When you know who visits your site, such as their age, gender, location, and interests, you can then make the proper decisions to improve your business and how you can communicate and engage with them. If you are familiar with Google Analytics, access the Audience tab to search your website data and generate reports that will illuminate who your visitors are. These reports will help you better understand them so you can confirm or enhance their user experience.
Some insights that are available in Google Analytics to help you get to know your visitors:
- Demographics: looks at age and gender
- Interests: Identifies interest groups to your audience, so that you can customize your site.
- Geo: shows the general location of where users looked up your website, as well as the language.
- Technology: Breaks down what browser and operating system your visitors are using. Therefore these insights can help you make sure your website runs properly on all browsers.
Top Landing Pages
Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics provides a section called “All Pages” where you can view a breakdown of pageviews, average time on page, and the bounce rate of the top pages on your website. By looking at the top viewed pages, you can see what interests them and focus on improving these pages, or focus on other pages that are not getting as much traffic compared to the top pages.
To view your most visited content in Google Analytics,
go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Conversions
A conversion occurs when a visitor completes an action you care about on your site. To set your website up to study or capture visitor actions, you’ll first want to identify the actions or goals you want them complete. There are 4 different type of goals you can create:
- Destination: visiting a certain web page
- Duration: how long a visitor is on your website
- Pages/Screens per session: how many pages the visitor view
- Event: play a video, click a link, or a button.
Setting up goals allows you to see the actions of your visitors that would be valuable for you to know about. You can then measure whether or not you are meeting the goals you want your visitors to take.
Traffic Sources
First time visitors will most likely find your website by typing in your URL, or into a google search. In Google Analytics, there are six main Default Channel Groupings:
- Organic: Visited your site from a search engine such as Google
- Direct: Directly typed in the URL, or bookmarked it
- Paid Search: User clicked on promoted URL link on a search engine
- Social: website clicked from a social media platform
- Referral: visits made to your website from a source outside of Google’s search engine.
- Email: website link clicked via email
Using these channels will help you see where exactly your visitors are coming from. You can then make a decision as to where to focus on to drive more traffic using sources your data is showing you will help improve your website.
Web Analytics is a key tool to drive your website and business in the right direction. There are many different tools you can use, such as Google Analytics, to help you better understand and take action on your website’s performance when it comes to engaging your key audience. From getting to know your visitors, to assessing activity on the top viewed pages, to better understanding the types of actions they take and where they are coming from, this information can provide you with a competitive advantage as well as an opportunity to get closer to your ideal customers.
If you’re interested in how we use web analytics efficiently for our clients, as well as the additional digital marketing services available at Aronson Advertising, reach out to our team of digital experts today!
