According to Google the definition is: “Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimising web usage.” – Web analytics for business growth.
For businesses with a digital presence it is important to analyse and measure the behaviour of the visitors on their website. Website analytics measures things like the 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. It is recommended by their analysis marketers that action should be taken immediately.
Web analytics is used to identify certain statistics regarding the businesses website. It is handy for those companies whom want to determine what is leading their audience to the website as well as what actions are being taken. Web analytics is used to determine market interest, segmentation of market, target market, analyse market trends and determine the behaviour of website visitors. It is also a useful tool to understand visitor’s interest and preferences.
Benefits of Web Analytics for Business Growth
Below are 6 advantages of web analytics for business growth:
1. Measure Web Traffic
Web analytics helps businesses to measure how many viewers are visiting the website as well as their geometrics such as where they are situated, and which keywords the visitors are using to search products and services. Web Analytics allows you to view the number of visitors that are on your site via the different sources such as search engines, through emails, social media and display ads. Web analytics also indicates to you, the number of conversions through each of these sources.
2. Visitors Count
Visitors are the number of individual people visiting your site as well as the number of times they visit your site. Visitors show the amount of traffic your website is receiving. 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.
You are also able to receive reports indicating the amount of time your visitors spend on your site as well as how much time visitors spend on any web page which helps to identify how engaging or effective your web page is.
3. Track Bounce Rate
When a visitor visits a page on your website, and then leaves the page without taking any action or clicking on any links its is called a Bounce. A bounce rate is the 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, therefore not finding interest. To improve visitor website journey experience, marketers 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.
4. Identify Exit Pages
There is a big difference between a bounce and an exit, they each provide a different set of metrics for any business to measure and therefore should not be confused to be same.
- A bounce is when a visitor visits a page on your website and leaves the same page.
- An Exit is when a visitor visits multiple pages on your website and then leaves the site.
Some pages on a site may have a high exit rate, like the thank you page on an ecommerce site after the purchase is done successfully. But if other pages have high exit rates which indicate those pages have some problem and need to be investigated immediately. Analysis of those pages needs to be done to understand if visitors are not getting the information they are looking for.
5. Optimize Marketing Campaigns
There is a tool provided by Google called URL builder, which is used to create a custom tracking code (URL) for any link to a website. This tool allows marketers to scope out the performance of a campaign and determine which campaigns bring the best visitors. This helps the marketers to align their resources in the right campaign or channel. When resources are aligned properly, this is what brings in a higher ROI (return on investment). By building a better understanding of what is working versus what is pulling the campaign down, the marketer can then invest more time on trying to optimize the correct strategies and get rid of the ones that aren’t.
6. Identify Target Market
One of the key aspects is understanding their audience and addressing the needs of individual clients differently for conversion optimization. When using analytics services, it is later revealed what the market currently demands and how the market varies with geographic location. Once it is understood what the visitors from different locations are looking for, said marketer is then able to make offers accordingly. Traceability is achieved when using web analytics, which allows the marketer to track the volume of visitors and monitor the performance of the business related to visitors’ interests and demographics data. The demographic details include age, gender and interests of the visitors visiting the website. Web analytics is used for various things, such as the ability to identify just how long a visitor has spent on a website. Capturing this data, will then allow the business to identify who their target market is.
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. Let us help you grow your business with optimised and high performing web analytics – reach out today to set up a free consultation.