Having a website is the first and essential step toward building a strong online presence for any business. A website is like the physical store, and the site URL is like the business address. The biggest difference is that a website can serve anyone in the world.
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimise web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness.
Here are some reasons why you need to use web analytics:
Know your visitors well
The likes and dislikes of your website visitors can be identified through web analytics. When you are planning to implement minor or significant changes in your business, you need to have an idea about whether your customers will like these changes; web analytics can help you know that. The first way of doing this through a process called A/B testing, checking the results of your newly implemented changes/design against the current one – the easiest way of doing this is using an industry-leading tool, Hotjar.
Know your best content
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics gives powerful insights into your top-performing and worst-performing pages. If you are a blogger, knowing this data provides an idea about what kind of content you should be focusing on and what type of content you should be avoiding. This way, you can avoid wasting time on creating content that will not provide effective results. Again, using the example of a blogger, this is extremely important if you monetise your blogs through featured ads and sponsors links so that you can work with relevant partners and affiliates.
eCommerce metrics
The main goal of any eCommerce site is to acquire more visitors to the website to gain more sales. Analytics tools like Google Analytics or MonsterInsights can provide eCommerce metrics like total revenue, conversion rate, top-performing products, etc. By knowing eCommerce metrics on analytics tools, you can create new strategies for boosting sales.
Improve page speed
Website speed is one of the important ranking factors for Google. However, no matter how great your website content is, your visitors will bounce back if your site does not load quickly. Through web analytics, you can get detailed insights into the loading speed of different pages. This way, you can better optimise your site and improve its overall loading speed.
Track top referrals
Web analytics tools can help you track top referrals to your website, giving you an idea of the top traffic sources to your website. For example, let say if your site gets the majority of its traffic from YouTube, it means you should keep creating content on YouTube and gain more traffic from there. Similarly to point 2, if you plan to monetise through featured ads and sponsors links, this can help identify the best partners and affiliates to collaborate with.
Real-time monitoring
On Google Analytics, you can check what your users are doing on your website in real-time. It displays the total number of users on your website and their current pages and can even be drilled down to more detail, such as where they are in the world and the devices they are using. This way, you can keep an eye on the activities of your visitors on your website and perhaps built campaigns around this data; have a lot of visitors from the UK during the evening? Run a promotion offering 20% off from 9pm – 11pm.
Final thoughts
These are the six important reasons why you should start using analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Web analytics are a vital part of the growth of any digital presence, whether that be on your website, Socials, YouTube channel etc. They allow you to review tangible data such as how often your visits are visiting, what they are and aren’t interacting with, how long they spend on a particular page, and so much more. Through web analytics, you can understand your visitors better and improve their experience.
We offer a range of analytics, reporting and optimisation solutions at Beyond Co. In addition, we launched an offer dedicated to supporting small businesses affected by the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic by providing ad credit to Google Ads or the social media platform of your choice, on us. Contact us to find out more.