Have you ever wondered why Web Analytics is important for your website? Web analytics provide you with reports and analytics on your website visitors and customer behavior. These analytics can improve your marketing and business strategies, which would ultimately result in more people visiting your site and becoming customers.
Today we will be discussing web analytics, their importance, the best web analytics tools, and their impact on different businesses on the web.
Let’s get into it!
What Is Web Analytics?
Web Analytics can easily be described as collecting, reporting, and analyzing website data. It reports the behavior and other data of a visitor to your website.
Traffic sources, bounce rates, conversion rates, referring sites, page views, and more are the data points or metrics which are collected through web analytics. Web analytics can help a business retain customers, attract more customers, and increase conversion rates as the primary purpose of web analytics is to show you where your marketing strategies are going astray. By identifying and fixing those problems, you’d be able to retain more customers.
Importance Of Web Analytics
The primary purpose of Web Analytics is to provide you with reports and analytics on user behavior and categorize them using demographic analysis, which includes factors such as gender, age, and location. The demographic analysis refers to socioeconomic information expressed statistically. Web analytics also explains how the visitors landed on your site, the most popular pages on your site, total conversions, and more. Here are the four reasons why Web Analytics is important for your website.
Focus On Your Best Content/Copy
An essential function of Web Analytics is to show which content or copy gets more visits, average duration, and bounce rates for an individual page. You can optimize these pages and add more CTAs on the most popular pages of your site and boost your conversions. With Web Analytics, you can also find out what kind of content and website copy work and what doesn’t, and you can make decisions based on this data.
SEO
SEO is crucial for your business because it provides your website the visibility to attract customers. According to the statistics provided by Bright edge, SEO drives 1000%+ more organic traffic than social media. With Web Analytics, you can find your visitor’s demographics and interests and use that data to create targeted website copy and content and get better visibility on search engines.
Referrals And Outbound Links
Another critical reason why web analytics is vital for your site is that they can help track who referred most traffic to your business site. This enables small businesses to generate referral traffic and devise strategies to gain more referrals to their websites. Outbound links are also crucial for your websites. You can make your outreach and partnership decisions based on the data coming from web analytics.
Ecommerce
The primary purpose of eCommerce analytics is to provide you with data-driven insights into how shoppers interact with your site. Web analytics can be used as a diagnostic tool that provides precise results that gauge eCommerce growth strategy effectiveness. There are numerous website analytics tools out there that can show all the essential eCommerce metrics like total revenue, conversion rates, top products, top sources, etc., in a report.
Benefits Of Web Analytics
The critical element of every successful business is its ability to understand its visitors and customers. With the help of web analytics, you can strategize your future marketing decisions and tailor your approach to provide customers with precisely what they need. Here is a list of benefits of web analytics.
- Web analytics can help you measure online traffic.
- These tools can help you track bounce rates.
- They can optimize and track marketing campaigns.
- They can help find the right target audience.
- They can help improve websites and their services.
- They can help in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
- With the help of these tools, companies can create specific goals to track.
- Improve results from Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Best Web Analytics Tools And APIs
Here is a list of the best Web Analytics tools and Analytics APIs.
Google Analytics
According to a survey, 74% of the 2000+ survey participants use Google Analytics. It can be used for traffic analysis, users, bounce rates, goal conversions, and visitor counts. Google Analytics is often described as the undisputed leader in web analytics, with over 30 million websites using it. Well-known companies like Udemy, Slack, and Robinhood use Google Analytics.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics can be used as an excellent alternative to Google Analytics. It is a paid specialist analytics tool that offers multichannel data collection spanning web, voice, OTT (Over-the-top), and IoT(Internet of Things). It has an easy-to-use interface with an interactive dashboard and provides unparalleled custom reporting. Adobe Analytics has a vast array of features, including Custom Variables, Offline data integration, Events Serialization, and Tag management.
MixPanel
MixPanel is an advanced business analytics platform. It helps track customer behavior and KPIs across websites and mobile apps. MixPanel is trusted and used by some famous brands like Uber, Twitter, Lemonade, and GoDaddy. It also offers some unique features like Slack integration, power analytics for gamified learning, sending laser-targeted messages, and build-highly customized dashboards. An important pricing aspect of MixPanel is that it allows you to build your pricing plan according to your business needs.
The Best Analytics APIs
Before we discuss the best APIs, we should know what APIs are. Analytics Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) are used to find trends, patterns, and customer behavior and help in predictive analysis. APIs enable applications to perform a systematic study of data which helps in decision making, and this data is mainly in an organization’s database.
The top APIs are:
Microsoft Text Analytics API
Microsoft Text Analytics API is a suite of text analysis web services. It enables API developers to carry out sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, language detection, and entity linking. Microsoft offers detailed documentation, code samples, and SDKs and helps you integrate the API into your most preferred programming language. Companies like Wilson Allen, Kepro, and KPMG use Microsoft Text Analytics.
KeenIO API
The primary function of KeenIO API is to let you ship custom user-facing interfaces seamlessly with low overload. This API enables developers to run counts, sums, funnels, averages, segmentation, and more using simple queries. Another perk of using KeenIO is that it provides visualization tools to draw and chart your data and display it on a dashboard. KeenIO is a paid API used by numerous well-known companies like Groove and Pixlee TurnTo.
Google Analytics API
Google Analytics API is a robust tool developed by Google and is mainly used by marketers, developers, and entrepreneurs to monitor traffic on their websites. Google Analytics API enables developers to monitor user interaction with websites, android applications, and IOS applications. Google has a massive community of developers and is a single-purpose API with a RESTful architecture.
Essential Metrics For Web Analytics
With web analytics, you know what metrics to track to improve your website. Here is a list of essential metrics for web analytics that you should track and focus on to gain more visitors.
Page View
Page views measure the number of times a user has visited a page on your website. A rise in page views can indicate successful SEO and marketing. Pageviews can tell what pages are popular on your site and help you improve your SEO strategies. Creating audience-focused content, adding internal links, and writing exciting headlines will help you improve page views on your website.
Average Time On Page
Average time on a page measures how long a visitor stays on your website page. The more time a visitor spends, the more engaging and interactive your content or copy is. A longer time on a page also means attracting interested visitors who might be open to doing business with you. You can improve the average time on a page by embedding multimedia content and optimizing page load times.
Average Session Duration
An average session duration is a group of interactions with your site within a set time, usually one to two hours. It can be equated to one person’s visit to your website, whether viewing a single page or exploring multiple pages on your site. To improve your average session duration, you need to optimize your navigation, content, and visual design so you can promote longer sessions on your website.
Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who load one page on your website and then leave without interacting with the page or visiting any other pages offered by your site. Higher bounce rates are the most common issue for eCommerce businesses. According to a survey, 42% of the consumers said they would leave a website with poor functionality. So to reduce bounce rates on your website, you need to improve your content’s readability, avoid pop-ups, create a compelling CTA, and target keywords with high-value traffic.
Conversion Rates
Conversion in web analytics is the percentage of visitors that complete a desired action on your website. This could mean filling out a contact form, downloading a file, signing up for a demo, or purchasing a product. You can improve conversion rates by adding live chats to your site, removing distractions, and strengthening your CTA copy.
Impact Of Web Analytics On Business
The primary purpose of web analytics is to analyze the behavior of the visitors on your website, but how can web analysis help a business? Web analytics have come across as a game-changer in the digital world, as it equips businesses with crucial information needed to improve their websites. Numerous companies changed their SEO or marketing strategies after discovering their low conversion rates through web analytics. Analytics has helped companies understand the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, weigh the pros and cons of their SEO strategy, and focus on the efforts required to achieve their business goals.
In recent years, business analytics has become widespread, with more and more companies recognizing the benefits of leveraging their data. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), industries like manufacturing, banking, and professional services are investing heavily in analytics, accounting for a third of all spending in 2021.
Companies across every industry recognize the importance of analytics, resulting in high demands for analytics experts that can extract meaningful insights and help them make significant decisions.
The U.S Bureau Of Labour Statistics has predicted that job opportunities for business analysts are expected to grow by 14% over the next year, adding about 100,000 jobs each year. Analytics can help companies make informed decisions.
By using analytics, businesses can:
- Understand consumer behavior
- Gain insight into their competitors
- Identify market trends
- Optimize operations
According to a survey conducted by Sisense, 50% of the companies are reportedly using analytics to improve their websites. If you are not one of these businesses, you need to start.
Conclusion
So this is it! I hope you enjoyed this article and it was helpful for you. Feel free to contact us if you have any queries or need help setting up analytics for your website.
I am a medical student and an avid fiction reader, with a penchant for travelling. I am currently working as a junior content writer at Genetech Solutions, one of Pakistan’s leading Software houses.
