Harnessing Web Analytics

Welcome to the latest article in our series on Getting to Know Your Customers. Here, we’re taking a peek into the world of web analytics and how you can use it to guide important business decisions!

Web analytics can be intimidating, but if you know where to look and how to interpret your data, you’ll gain access to a world of valuable insights about your customers, your broader audience, and the way they interact with your business! Today, there are tons of web analytics tools available for businesses to take advantage of, so it’s never been easier to harness the power of web analytics for your brand.

When we use the term “web analytics”, we are specifically referring to the collection, analysis, and interpretation of website visitor data. When analyzed properly, web analytics can provide valuable information about your web visitors’ behaviors, and more broadly, their user experience. Businesses can use the knowledge gained from their own online data to inform important marketing and organizational decisions aimed at attracting new customers, retaining existing customers, increasing sales, or improving their overall customer experience.

There are tons of different metrics that can be tracked to help inform business decisions, but to avoid getting lost in the numbers, it’s best to choose a few key metrics to keep an eye on. One way to narrow things down is to think about your specific business objectives: do you have a goal to increase your web traffic? How about increasing the percentage of your site visitors who become paying customers? Or maybe you want to inform your strategy by understanding which products or pages on your site are the most interesting to your audience. Whatever your goal is, you’ll find metrics that will help inform you about where you’re currently at, where you need to be, and, taken into context with other data points and the broader environment of your business, they can even give you an idea of what you need to do to get there.

Some of the most common metrics are Page Views, which tell you how many times a specific page on your site has been visited, New and Returning Visitors, which tell you how many people visit your site who have, or have not, visited it before. Tools like Google Analytics can also tell you what your highest-selling products have been for a given time period; the most common traffic sources to your site (e.g. are people coming to your site by clicking on paid ads, visiting email links, or through a search engine?); demographic information about your visitors; your bounce rate, which is the number of people who leave your site after only viewing a single page; and they can even give you conversion rates which identify how often your site visitors are taking a desired action, for example making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter. These are just a few examples of the many metrics that can be measured and analyzed.

It is important to recognize that while web analytics can be a powerful tool, measurements of web data can never be 100% perfect. For example, if a person visits a page of your site and then refreshes the page in their browser, that would count as two page views. If they visit your site on their laptop and then again on their mobile device, they may be recorded as two unique site visitors. And of course, not every visit to your site will be a visit from a ‘real’ person. Bots can (and will) account for a portion of your site traffic. Importantly, the use of cookies is also not completely reliable for tracking your visitors. We recommend never relying on one measurement in isolation and always trying to place your data in the larger context of your business. By taking these steps, you are safeguarding yourself from being misled, or missing the underlying story that your data is telling.

If you want to learn more about web analytics, these articles from Hubspot, Amplitude, and the Houston Chronicle have even more information to help you get started. You can also access the Google Analytics Demo Account to get a real peek at what powerful analytics tools can do!