Understanding the Basics of Website Analytics and How to Leverage Them

Website analytics helps with the measurement, analysis, and collection of traffic data.

By getting such valuable insight about the website visitors’ businesses can be managed accordingly so that more data-driven decisions can be made.

Here in the article, we will discuss some details about the metrics of web analytics, best practices, and some tools.

Website analytics is extremely important and you should accordingly use it, but we highly recommend starting your online presence by determining the right hosting solutions for your website.

For instance, you can buy Windows VPS or other types of appropriate hosting plans.

The main metrics of web analytics

For appropriate measurement of website performance, it is important to understand the major website metrics. Here are a couple of them:

• Pageviews: This metric is tracked every time a website is loaded. The more web pages are entered the more traffic is on the website. Together with the pageview, it is crucial to track the time spent on the website and the bounce rate.
  
  
• Sessions: The session is a specific time frame during which a group of users are on the website. This analytics indicates the number of individual sessions during a certain time.
  
  
• Bounce Rate: This indicator shows the percentage of users who entered a website but have never checked other web pages.
  
  
• Unique Visitors: This metric gives valuable insight into how many new and returning users enter the website during a certain period.
  
  
• Traffic Source: This shows where the users are coming from, so you can easily detect whether it is from referral sites, organic search, direct visitors, or social media.

Helpful practices for leveraging website analytics

Website analytics should be used accordingly to give the most value, so here are the most basic practices:

• The data insights need to be shared among the team members. Website analytics itself should be used appropriately in order to get the maximum possible results.
  
  The received dashboards should be shared with all the departments that need them. The analytics should be accessible to all the teams for better decision-making.
  
  
• Analytics for the business goals. First of all, every company should have a list of accessible and clear business goals. When knowing the goals, you can use web analytics to achieve your results. For instance, you might want to minimize the bounce rate, increase conversion, or any other aims.
  
  
• Monitor the traffic deeper than just the traffic volume. Well sure, the traffic activity is important, however, it is crucial to pay attention to scroll depth, bounce rate, and time on the webpage.
  
  
• Decision-making based on the analytics. Depending on the data being collected you can accordingly create the marketing strategy and optimize the website.
  
  
• Analyze collected data appropriately. All the collected information should be categorized and divided according to the traffic location, source, etc. Try to make weekly or monthly reports for the tendency identifications.

Tools for the web analytics

There are lots of tools for web analytics, but the most popular are considered to be Google Analytics, Flywheel, Crazy Egg, and Hotjar.

Google Analytics is a free tool via which it is possible to check the bounce rate, sessions, and other metrics. Moreover, you can use a customizable dashboard, behavioral report, and mobile analytics.

As for the Crazy Egg, it is a great marketing tool specifically needed for heatmap analytics. Its major benefits are A/B testing, conversion points, visitor behavior, and many more.

With Flywheel, it is possible to check the activity of the users on every webpage separately. The tool has a fantastic lead-tracking system, sales analytics, campaign reports, source reports, and other features.

Try to select the tool that suits your business goals and has all the needed features for the convenience of tracking.

Read: The Power of Data Analytics: How Insights Can Drive Business Decisions

How to improve the website performance with analytics?

With the proper analysis of the engagement and user behavior, you can figure out the areas that should be optimized. It is advisable to start with the navigation issues.

Test the bounce rate, webpages where users stay the least, and spike in exit from a specific page.

By monitoring this data, you can understand if there are broken links, unclear navigation, or just irrelevant content.

One more helpful recommendation is to optimize the loading time of the web pages. The websites with the low loading speed have low rates of conversion.

The speed metrics are helpful for the identification of loading issues. To solve this issue, you should minimize HTTP requests, change the image size, and use the caching plugin.

There is some percentage of users who visit the website but don’t purchase your service/product.

To remind these users about your company, the best possible recommendation is to engage them via the ads.

The constant analysis of the website analytics will show where the issues are so you can identify and solve them.

Even the tiniest improvement that is based on web analytics can significantly improve the conversion rate.