Why Should You Review Your Website Analytics?
Don’t be scared! Website analytics may sound like technical wizardry to the uninitiated, but trust us, if you have a website you need to be reviewing your website analytics – and it needn’t be complicated. It is part of the process you need to have in place to encourage your business to grow.
What are website analytics?.
Website analytics is basically a load of data, graphs and figures that explain who has been looking at your website, how, when, and why.
It will tell you how visitors arrive at your website, what they look at on your website, and how long they look at each page.
The purpose is to look at user behaviour and show what is working on the website.
There is a lot of data and measurements you can look at – which can feel overwhelming and put people off. Looking at three or four key metrics when first starting is a good tip.
What kind of data is measured on website analytics?
Website analytics can show traffic source, bounce rate, returning visitors, new visitors, unique page views and page views, to mention just a few metrics.
You do need to understand what each means, to establish what action is needed. Or use a specialist to do it for you.
How can I use website analytics to improve my website?
The data will show what is working – and not working – on your website. Tracking the analytics, and seeing how a change to the website or your digital marketing impacts the data, will help you reach more of your target market.
If your analytics show that the majority of your users are mobile-based, then you may want to focus more on mobile design. If you can see that visitors land on your homepage but quickly leave (high bounce rate), you may want to review the design and content of your homepage. If you see that certain articles are more popular than others, that can influence your SEO and keywords.
Benefits of reviewing your website analytics
Know your User.
To provide a great user experience, you need to know who your user is. Website analytics can do that.
You can find out who your website visitors are by:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Mobile or desktop user
- How they are finding your website
This is great information! And even better if you track and note changes. You can make sure that your content, design, and digital marketing are focused on your users to give them a fantastic user experience. It may be that your demographics shift, moving away from your original strategy and business plan. Analytics will give you the data you need to tweak and change your approach.
Track success
By regularly monitoring your website analytics you can track your success against certain goals.
If you want to attract a younger user, you may increase your TikTok presence, or start new inbound link relationships. You can use analytics to see the impact of these changes.
You can see the content that gets the best bounce rate, and the most visits, so you can change the website design to add a call-to-action button to improve conversions.
Increase Traffic
Website analytics gives you knowledge. It gives you facts and figures on how your website is performing. You can use that data to increase traffic to your website by:
- Understanding what is your most popular content – and do more of the same.
- Understanding your demographics and target that audience in a strategic, focused way through digital marketing
- Understanding the journey through the website and streamline it to make it quick and easy for users to find the information they want
Stay ahead of the competition
By understanding who your users are, and how they are interacting with your website, you can stay ahead of the competition. Analytics will give you the information you need to use your time and money in the right place to get the results that you want. You can test campaigns, see what works and either move on or repeat.
There are some fantastic free tools out there to help you review your analytics that are user-friendly. If you are feeling it may push you over the edge in an already busy schedule, give us a shout. We would love to help you. We could set up analytics for you, train you on what to look at and what it means, or even produce regular reports for you.
