With a simple web counter, you can keep track of the total number of people who visit your website. On the back end, more detailed web analytic data will show you the IP numbers and countries of origin of each visitor, as well as which web pages they have visited.
A digital marketing and data analyst uses raw data to find the information they need. To do this, they use a variety of tools. This blog post from Emerson College looks at the tools used by online marketers. These include customer segmentation tools, market-basket analytics, and web analytics.
This kind of data can be used to paint an overall picture of your audience, what they like, and how they interact with content. So, what can be achieved with all this? Read below to understand the various ways web analytics are used.
Analyzing Historical Web Traffic Data
In order to change the direction of where your website is going, look at all of the historical data. A website on a top-level domain that has been registered for many years will get steady traffic naturally. Website owners who launch new websites will be even more dependent on web analytics those first few important months. They may need to look at their web analytics to track outbound and inbound links, perhaps to see if their link exchanging efforts have been a success. Historical web data can also identify which are your most popular blog posts, helping you to create new posts that gain similar traction.
Click-Through Rates and Engagement Via Social Media
Whenever a new visitor gets to a website, the intention is to have them do something. Blog authors might write a series of posts designed to keep visitors coming back to read more. Jewelry websites want visitors to click through the categories and links until they find an item they want to have purchased. Website engagement is the driving force behind web analytics and the entire reason that marketers, and website owners, and even influencers put in all the work that they do. You will find that you can use web analytics to increase conversion rates, click-through rates, and gain better engagement levels. Web analytics are often used in conjunction with split testing different versions of websites during testing.
Know how to change your website in a manner that visitors react to positively and makes them want to come back over and over again.
Learning What Type of Content Work Versus What Doesn’t
The type of content a website features is always going to depend on the niche and purpose of the web property. If you run a forum, you might have more user-generated content that attracts visitors. Stock related websites may have market tickers, predictions, and content written by industry experts. Not all of the content that your website features is going to be popular with visitors, and that is fine. What you do want to know is which content is performing the best, so that you can hopefully produce even more of it.
Measuring the Rate of Return Visitors
Knowing how many visits are repeat visitors is invaluable for website owners. When internet users find a website that they like, they engage with it, freely click links, and spend a couple of minutes looking around. However, web surfers who don’t care for a website waste no time going somewhere else. If people are coming back to your website, there are lots of things that you are doing right. Learn from this data and you will have additional visitors coming back more frequently. Return website visitors can be shoppers interested in the newest sales, or niche readers who enjoy all of your new blog posts. In any case, this data is important to know.
Find Out Where Your Website Traffic is Originating
Visitors come to websites in a number of different ways. A link can be texted between friends, included in a Twitter post, or mentioned on a web page. A web search that includes a keyword included in your web content may be a source of many of your visitors. If you have an Instagram account, wouldn’t you like to know if your visitors are coming from your profile page and posts? Tools like Google Analytics are heavily depended on to generate detailed reports that include graphs and charts. These analytics are great for tracking where internet traffic is coming from.
Improving Website Speed
As visitors come to your website from their PCs and laptops at home, their smartphones and tablets from afar, they all want to load each page fast. While internet users might have been okay with waiting a few moments for a website to load, connection speeds have become a measure of authority and trustworthiness. In short, your website needs to load fast, consistently, across networks, servers, and various ISPs. You will know how fast your website is loading for visitors by reviewing the analytics. If your website experiences server outage complications or ends up being blocked in certain regions for some reason, this information will be present in your analytics reports.
Marketing and Sales
For any website owner who is hoping to use web analytics to boost profits, you’re in luck. There are very specific metrics that can be used to steer visitors into taking certain actions, such as clicking on a link. If you create a squeeze page, website analytics will measure conversion rates and supply you with what you need to make additional improvements. Many times, web analytics are utilized to provide a nice neat overview of how a web property is performing. While Google provides many features that website owners are familiar with, other website analytics tools like Clarity from Microsoft are also becoming popular. If you are interested in marketing, then you need to make good use of web analytics.
If you own a domain, have it hosted, and receive web traffic, you need to understand analytics. Improving engagement and growing traffic can be done completely organically, and yet knowing what is going on behind the scenes can only make your plan clearer. Give website visitors more of what they came to see and read, and understand the raw data you extrapolate from web data more sufficiently via analytics. The best way to grow your website is to determine what the people visiting it enjoy about it the most.