In today’s digital era more and more businesses are going online. The Internet may be the main source of customers and contribute to growth and development of a business. However, a quality site, conduction of online-events, SEO, PPC and SMM are useless without a well-built strategy. Elaboration of the strategy is impossible without constant analysis.
Web analytics will help you with this.

Web analytics is one of marketing tools for any kind of business presented on the Internet. Analysing customer behaviour on the site business owners, internet-marketers, web-analysts are able to optimize user path to conversion. Keep track of important information about your site: micro and macro conversions, clicks, page views. It is important to understand what users do on your website and on which stage of the conversion funnel majority of customers leave the site. Web analytics tools allow you to build marketing strategy and track impact of conducted events on user behaviour. Analytics makes it possible not only to improve design and functionality of your site but also to determine development directions: focus resources on already existing products or develop new proposals to meet the needs of the target audience.

What interesting information can the analytics tell us?

1. Who are your users?

Being aware of who is your potential customer is extremely important for building marketing strategy. Analytics allows you to get acquainted with users, find out their sex, age, place of living, preferred hobbies and used devices. This information enables you to create a portrait of your target audience. If you certainly know who your potential customer is, keep track of the traffic quality coming to your website.

2. User behavior on the site

You can find out not only who your users are, but also what landing pages they come to, how many pages they view, how they navigate the site, on which pages and they leave your site and where they go. You can add the most relevant information, calls to action, conversion buttons on the top target pages, and optimize pages with high bounce rates for more effective interaction with users.

3. Site content analysis

Find out which pages users visit most often, how much time they spend on them, at what time and days of the week they are most active. Adapt your content strategy to the most popular type of content, publish articles and news during the most user activity, this will help to attract more targeted traffic to the site.

4. How do users get to your site?

As a rule, users get to the site from various sources. If you are actively involved in SMM, your subscribers can go to the site from social networks, as well as share links and posts with their friends. Someone can leave a link to your site on a forum or write an article about your company. Run contextual advertising and email newsletters that will generate traffic. Use different online promotion tools and analyze which of them are the most effective, which are less and why.

Website traffic channels and sources

Main traffic channels:

  • Organic traffic – traffic from search engines.
  • Paid traffic – traffic from pay-per-click ads, including ads on search and social networks.
  • Display – getting to the site from media ads.
  • Direct traffic – direct transitions to the site. Traffic is considered direct when users get to the site by writing the site address in the address bar or through bookmarks in the browser.
  • Social networks – traffic from social networks.
  • Email – getting to the site by clicking on the links from emails.
  • Referral traffic – following links from other sources. Those may be purchase or natural links.

5. SEO metrics analysis

Improving the site’s position in search results is a very important part of Internet promotion. SEO allows you to attract more users from search engines to the site. Track traffic, analyze backlinks, line items and search queries.

6. Analysis of contextual advertising effectiveness 

Web analytics tools will help to collect keywords for launching ad campaigns and define the optimal budget. Experiment with different bidding strategies, measure their effectiveness. Analyze your average ad position, CTR, and conversion cost.

7. Analytics in social networks

In today’s reality, being represented on social networks is extremely important for the brand image. Track the interactions of your subscribers with your company account, measure the coverage of publications and analyze the effectiveness of targeted ads.

8. How users interact with your business across devices

The digital environment is rapidly adapting to the integration of mobile devices to our lives. The user behavior from smartphones and computers is significantly different. Analyze at what stages of the conversion funnel, from which devices and how users interact with your site. Usually potential customers are looking for goods and services from mobile devices and converting from desktop computers. Take care of the site`s mobile version usability or create a mobile application.

9. Tracking conversions

The main task of the site is to convert visitors to leads or buyers. Determine which KPIs are significant in your area. Analyze how effective your investment in marketing is. Find out which users leave applications through the form, go to the pages of social networks, make purchases, calls or other targeted actions. Find out why some visitors come to the conversion, while others do not.

So, what indicators should you pay more attention to? It depends on your business and what goals you set for it. If you have an online store, placing orders, the average check and abandoned baskets will be important for you. If you run an information resource, then the important indicators will be the time spent on the site and the number of pages viewed.

Key KPIs that are important to track through analytics for any business:

  • Users – the number of users who visited your site at least once during the selected time period.
  • Sessions – the number of sessions for the selected time period. Multiple sessions can be assigned to one user.
  • Bounce rate – the percentage of sessions in which the user immediately left the site without making any interactions.
  • Conversion rate is the ratio of targeted actions to the total number of site visitors.
  • CPA (cost per action) – the cost of the target action.

Now it becomes absolutely clear that analytics is significant in working with websites. Start measuring your KPIs to build the most effective marketing strategy and improve the convertibility of your web resources.