What is Web Analytics?
Google definition: “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 to analyze and measure the behavior of the visitors that come to their website. Website analytics measures things like where a number of visitors, source of visit, pages viewed, and actions taken on the site, as well as things like page views, time spent on a page, sources of traffic and visitor demographics and many other.
There are several metrics that are 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.
Why Web Analytics?
Web analytics is useful to any business for determining market interest, segmentation of market, target market, analyze market trends and determine the behavior of website visitors. It is also useful tool to understand visitor’s interest and preferences.
Benefits of Web Analytics for Business Growth
Here are 6 Advantages of Web Analytics for Business Growth:
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Measure Web Traffic
Web analytics helps to measure how many viewers are visiting the website and from where they are coming and which keywords the visitors are using to search products and services. Web Analytics shows the number of visitors arriving at site via the different sources like search engines, through emails, social media and display ads. In addition to this it also shows the number of conversions through each of these. This information is important for any business and helps them decide in which channel should they focus and invest.
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Visitors Count
Visitor is the number of individual people that visited the site and a visit is number of times a visitor goes to a site. Visitors show the traffic website is getting. This tool also determines how many times a visitor returned to a website and which pages were given preference by visitors. It also tells about visitor’s country (pinpoint the city of origin) and language.
Web analytics even gives reports about how much time visitors spend on any web page which helps to identify how engaging or effective a web page is. Such reports help to improve pages and decrease their bounce rate (low engagement). It also indicates pages high engagement time and clicks and tells in which product or service visitor might be interested.
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Track Bounce Rate
A bounce is when a visitor visits a page on the website and then leaves the same page without taking any action or clicking on any links on that page. And bounce rate is total bounces divided by total visits on the web site. A high bounce rate could mean visitors are not finding what they were looking for and they left the site. To improve visitor website journey experience, marketer should keep track of bounce rate for each page and the page with high bounce rate should be improved. This is one of the most noteworthy advantages of web analytics.
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Identify Exit Pages:
Bounce and exit are different metrics for any business to measure and should not be confused to be same. Unlike a “bounce”, when a visitor visits a page on website and leaves the same page, an “exit” is when a visitor visits multiple pages on website and then leaves the site. Some pages on a site may have a high exit rate, like the thank you page on an e-commerce site after the purchase is done successfully. But if other pages have high exit rate indicates those pages have some problem and need to be looked into immediately. Analysis of those pages needs to be done to understand if visitors are not getting the information they are looking for.
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Optimize Marketing Campaigns:
Google provides a tool called URL builder to create a custom tracking code (URL) for any link to website. This enables marketers to measure the campaigns performance and which campaigns drive the best visitors. This helps the marketers to align their resources in the right campaign or channel. Resources when properly aligned would results high ROI (return on investment). By gaining an understanding of what’s working and what’s not marketer can invest time on optimizing the right strategies, and drop the strategies that aren’t working.
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Identify Target Market:
It is important for marketer to understand their visitors and address to the needs of different clients differently for conversion optimization. The findings of analytics services reveal the current market demands and the market demand varies with geographic location. Once it is known what the visitors from particular location is looking for, marketer can accordingly make their offerings. Using web analytics marketer can track volume of visitors and performance of business related to visitors interests and demographics data. The demographic details include age, gender and interests of the visitors visiting the website. The web analytics can even identify how long visitors spend time on website. Such data will help the business to identify their target market.
Learnings:
Web analytics help businesses identify their target audience, improve bounce rate, and increase ROI by aligning resources to right channels/campaigns and many more. Even if the marketing budget is low businesses can still make huge profits using different reports generated by Web Analytics. Analytics help to see not only day to day data but also the trends over time.
Join a digital marketing course to learn more about web analytics, and you’ll discover all the free resources available for analyzing consumer behavior.
