You need data to devise an effective online marketing strategy. There are thousands of ways you can market your website, brand, products, and services. So, which approach is most suitable for your niche and business? The average conversion rate of websites stands at around 2.35 percent. It means if there are 100 organic visitors to your website, only 2 of them will convert.
The website analytics data plays a huge role in the approach you follow and devising a result-oriented marketing strategy. It tells you all you need to know and more about the visitors landing on your website and your website’s interaction with the search engines. This data allows you to tweak your marketing strategy as per consumers’ behavior and offer value to the end-users, resulting in a higher conversion rate and enhanced revenue.
What is Website Analytics?
The process of collecting, processing, storing, measuring, reporting, and analyzing website data is referred to as website analytics. Website analytics allows businesses to see how their web marketing campaigns are performing, what is working and what is not, find issues with online services to improve them, know the audience (age, location, demographics), and create customer profiles to target better and boost overall business profitability.
In other words, website analytics is the data collected about how the visitors interact with your website. Which site sent the visitor to your website, how much time are they spending on your website, which web page are they staying on for the longest, number of page visits per day, and more.
At ShiftWeb, our aim is not only to collect, process, and analyze website analytics data but also to make sense of it. It helps you understand what you’re doing right or wrong and make the necessary changes to keep the revenues high and the competition behind.
Classification of Web Analytics Data
Before we broadly discuss the benefits of website analytics, let us breakdown the data offered by web analytics –
Campaign Data
- Key Performing Keywords
- Referral URLs generating the most traffic
- Which campaigns are more successful and are driving the most traffic to your website.
- A breakdown of campaign logistics in terms of social media, email marketing, PPC, etc, and identify which campaign medium is getting results.
Audience Behavior
- Bounce rate
- Time spent on the website
- Pages visit
- Most visited pages
- Exit pages
- Common landing pages
Audience Data
- Location/Country
- Age
- Profession
- Unique or Repeat Visitors
- Number of visits
- The ratio between returning or new customers.
- The device through which the site is accessed – PC, mobile, tablet, laptop, etc.
- Browser used – Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, etc.
Some vanity metrics don’t really influence the bottom line but are useful and relevant nonetheless. It includes –
- Email open rates
- Social media likes
- View count
- Blog post views
Now that we have defined what website analytics is and its classification let us understand why web analytics is important for businesses and overall business growth. Let’s dig deeper!
Benefits of Website Analytics
Measure Traffic to Your Website
Some of the crucial data web analytics offer includes –
- How many users/visitors are on your website in real-time?
- Where are the visitors on your website from? – (Check from where most of the visitors are from)
- Detailed metrics of visitors’ interaction with your website – What are the visitors doing on the website?
- Amount of time spent by the visitors on the website.
- Sources where the visitors are directed to your website – social media, search engines, others!
Website analytics provides a breakdown of traffic sources and website conversions in an easily comprehensible way. The analysis of this data helps businesses decipher which elements of the website are high-performance oriented and what activities would help boost a business’s profitability.
Website analytics allows businesses to see how their paid marketing efforts are performing and how much organic traffic the website is getting. Such data can play a crucial role in ensuring businesses spend their time and money effectively.
Track Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the metrics when visitors to the website leave without any measurable interaction.
High bounce rate signifies –
- The users didn’t like the content or felt the content wasn’t relevant for them.
- The information available on the website doesn’t match the user’s search query well.
- Poor user experience.
When your website analytics data show a high bounce rate, the website is deemed as poorly optimized for conversion. You cannot expect your website to attract high-quality leads, boost sales, or trigger conversions of any type.
Business profitability depends on tracking and enhancing the overall user experience your website offers. It includes publishing content your target audience is looking for or values. Also, it is important to keep a close watch on the website’s analytics to track various exit pages. It will tell you which of your website’s pages are performing poorly so that corrective measures can be taken.
Optimize, Measure, and Track Marketing Campaigns
One of the unique benefits offered by website analytics is that it helps with optimizing, tracking, measuring, and scaling marketing campaigns. Every marketing campaign has a web footprint, which can be tracked and monitored using website analytics. It helps in getting an insight into how the audience receives the campaign.
It is important to remain within the budget while focusing on maximizing ROI when it comes to marketing. Website analytics helps in understanding which campaigns are more profitable and which ones are performing poorly. As a small business, it is important to save more and get more done for less. Small businesses have to develop meticulous monetary and marketing mechanisms to get the most bangs for their buck, and website analytics comfortably solves that problem.
The unique links for a marketing campaign can be created using Google Campaign URL Builder.
Sharing the campaign link in an event, on the website, on social media, or in the email marketing campaign would allow real-time monitoring and tracking of the campaign. The resulting data available through analytics decides the profitability of the campaign.
Find the Right Audience, Improve Marketing Campaign’s Effectiveness
The whole point of marketing is to find and reach the target audience. If your marketing efforts are not targeted to the right set of people, it decreases profitability while increasing your marketing expense.
Web analytics provides the information needed to develop targeted marketing campaigns, reach out to the right audience, and get maximum results without spending a fortune. It leads to a more impactful and positive brand experience for the end-users and helps boosts sales, improve brand loyalty, and increase brand awareness.
Without getting the necessary information provided by website analytics, creating targeted marketing campaigns is nearly impossible. Moreover, the resulting campaigns come across as vague without addressing the pain points of the end-users.
It fails to stick and doesn’t resonate with your target audience, leaving a rather unimpressive image in the minds of potential customers.
Helps With Improving & Optimizing Website and Related Web Services
Web analytics provides data that helps identify problems with the website and ancillary services offered online. For example, a poorly designed sales funnel in an e-commerce website would lead to decreased sales, impacting the overall company’s revenue negatively.
If the users are unable to navigate the website fluidly or can’t find what they’re looking for easily, it would distract their mindset of making a purchase. The solution to this is creating separate landing pages for various purposes.
Also, web analytics helps in tracking the performance of the websites on desktop and mobile versions. It is the key to understanding where you’re getting the most traffic and if tweaks are needed to improve user experience.
You can’t read users’ minds, but website analytics helps in decoding the requirements of the end-users, ensuring you at least come close. It makes a huge difference in the performance of the website, brand image, revenue, and users’ experience.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Websites cannot improve their conversion optimization elements without having access to website analytics. The primary goal of CRO is to ensure the users do what they’re expected to do.
The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of users. Many different types of conversions need to be tracked on a website. Small businesses need to keep track of the conversions that are crucial to their business success.
Some of the important conversions are –
- Sales funnel process – (adding to cart, checking out, product views, purchases, etc.)
- Leads
- Registrations
- Bids
- Offers
- Social Media Shares
- Clicks on Contextual-Links
- Video Views
- Newsletters Sign-Ups
- Contact Forms
- Feedback
- Subscriptions
- Become a Member
- Brochure Downloads
Web analytics can turn around the conversion rate of a website. It helps with maximizing ROI and the overall profitability of the company.
Conversion optimization is crucial today because increasing web traffic to the website isn’t enough anymore. Until the website is optimized for conversion, the visitors won’t convert into customers. Focus on increasing the sales rather than staying heavily invested only in driving traffic.
Monitoring Business Objectives Online
Businesses should develop websites with clear goals they want to achieve through them. Web analytics makes it possible to track certain set goals. It helps in ensuring the company is able to respond quickly to certain situations and events.
It is also important for businesses to ascertain what goals are important for them. Tracking too many goals simultaneously can create more problems than it solves. Businesses should focus on limiting the goals to track and ensure maximum efficiency and profitability. It is only possible when a business has clear goals and objectives.
The basic nature of the goals to follow must measure the weaknesses, effectiveness, and profitability of certain events.
Improve Effectiveness of Google & Facebook Ads
Managing online advertisements efficiently, profitably, and economically is not possible without analytics. The analytics data provides crucial metrics information such as clicks, demographic data, conversion rate, bounce rate, and more. It gives an insight into how the ad is performing and how well it is received by the audience.
For small businesses with a limited marketing budget, such insightful data can make or break pay-per-click campaigns. It helps take corrective measures to improve the results achieved through the ads and drastically improve its efficiency.
Web analytics also helps understand which ads are gaining more traction, which ads are not getting desired results, which platform (Facebook, Instagram, Google) is getting more response, the demographics of the audience (age, gender, location, etc.), and more.
Such data not only helps in crafting a more result-oriented marketing strategy but also helps with retargeting ads.
Getting Started Is Easy
Web analytics isn’t rocket science. Businesses can retrieve much of the analytics information through Google Analytics, which is a free tool. It is easy to install and use and can be integrated with just about any platform. It provides a basic overview of how your online business is performing.
However, in today’s competitive business environment, it is important for businesses, both online and offline, to take measures to stay one step ahead. And, while Google Analytics may seem enough in the preliminary stages of business initiation and growth, more comprehensive analytic information can prove to be instrumental at times.
At ShiftWeb, we provide in-depth, exhaustive, and decluttered website analytics that makes it easier for your business to monitor ads performance. The insightful reports provided by us would connect all the dots that are difficult for a non-tech-savvy business owner to understand.
Most of all, the website analytics we offer gets you an eagle’s eye view of how your online business is performing. It gives you an integrated view of performance-based analytics from over 60 marketing channels.
Gone are the days when such enterprise-level analytics was available to only the big wigs in the industry. ShiftWeb offers you web analytics data, without the unnecessary jargon, to help you make the decisions necessary to scale up and power your business.
Get Creative Ideas – Innovate, Expand, & Excel With Website Analytics
One of the real struggles that most small businesses face or are the reason behind low growth, failure, or uncertainty is the lack of perspectives. Businesses might think they know their target audience well, but it has been proved time and again that it’s not always the case. The advertisement you thought would perform well fails to deliver, and the one you thought of scrapping earlier gets the most clicks and conversions.
It would feel even worse if you get to know this at the end of the campaign or when a sizeable portion of the marketing budget is already used up. Web analytics data can help you prevent such surprises.
Web analytics opens doors to new opportunities to find new and fresh perspectives in your business. It helps you track new trends, know about customer experiences, and give hints about what works and what doesn’t, allowing businesses to get creative with their business and marketing strategies.
For example, if a newly published post on your website gets huge traffic than other areas of your website, it could hint towards what the customers are looking for. Creating and publishing content on these high-performing keywords and conversion-optimized blog posts can help boost the profitability of your marketing campaign. Similarly, if videos are getting more attention or articles with infographics get more traction than normal blogs, and so on, you’ll know sooner. It would help you get creative to add value to what you bring to the table for a broader audience, helping you scale, stand out, and establish yourself as a brand.
Identify High-Performing Content
This might seem like the carry forward of the last point, but the importance of this point validates a standalone section. You cannot keep posting content about Walkman when customers are looking for information about iPod. Website analytics tells you which content is getting more organic traffic, bounce rate, average duration, source, etc.
Once you know what topics/niches are getting more hits, you can focus and work on them more aggressively. Moreover, the understanding offered by these metrics allows you to add more CTA (call-to-action) buttons, purchase links, etc, in and around the content to boost sales and conversion rate. It helps increase overall business profitability and enhances customer engagement, which is the key to creating brand awareness.
Improve Your Website’s SEO
Search engine optimization is vital to the success of your business and the website’s higher rankings in the search engines. The higher the traffic to your website, the higher would be the sales, conversions, and search engine rankings.
Website analytics is the backbone of your website’s SEO in ways more than one. It helps you gain more visibility online by creating user-oriented and targeted content as per the interests and the demographic information of your website’s visitors provided by website analytics.
The website analytics would help you analyze and identify the search queries through which the visitors are landing on your website, ensuring you can direct your efforts in the right direction. The analytics data is also helpful in optimizing your website to meet the visitors’ expectations by setting up site search tracking.
The actual work begins when your website goes live, and website analytics ensures your efforts are not misdirected or going in vain. It can not only lead to loss of time but a considerable amount of money, suppressing your growth and giving leeway to your competitors. So, use website analytics information to optimize your on-page and off-page SEO, enhancing the overall experience of your target audience and the value you offer.
Tracking Referral Sources
Website analytics helps businesses to find out which online sources are referring maximum traffic to their site. It can help device more effective strategies by analyzing and focusing on these sources to get more referrals from these and other similar sources.
It is also a good indicator to determine if your website’s SEO efforts are getting results by analyzing these referral sources and how much organic traffic from search engines is.
Track and Monitor E-Commerce Metrics to Enhance Business Profitability
Irrespective of the nature of your business, if you’re selling anything, you have to have a sales report to think ahead and develop a business strategy. Website analytics will provide you with the e-commerce metrics you need to make any tweaks to your marketing strategy, placement of products, etc, to boost sales. These metrics include sales, revenue, conversion rates, opt-ins, top-selling products, traffic, top-referral sources, etc.
At ShiftWeb, we understand the importance of website analytics for e-commerce websites and provide a comprehensive report that can help with –
- Conversion Rate
- Customer Engagement
- Boost Sales & Revenue
- Product Placement Strategy
- SEO Strategy
- Help Streamline Navigation
- Track Customers’ Behavior Trends (On Website)
The success of e-commerce websites depends heavily on website analytics data not only to structure their website as per the audience’s need but also to tweak the online marketing strategy to gain more visibility, traffic, and sales.
Developing a business strategy that works relies on market data. Similarly, the online marketing campaign and its ROI depend on the website analytics data. It is essential for businesses to play around with the analytic data to find an equation that works for them and helps them stay competitive in an overcrowded market.
ShiftWeb offers comprehensive website analytics services to propel your business growth, fulfill business and marketing objectives, and dominate your market without having to spend a fortune. With most businesses trying to get a lead, analytics is a crucial element of your web presence that’s just cannot be discounted.
Do you need help with website Analytics? Contact us at ShiftWeb by sending a proposal and let us know how we may be of assistance to you.