Why Web Analytics Tools Are Important for Your Website
You might have a stunning website with the most mind blowing visuals and advanced functionality, but it is all a waste if you are not getting conversions. To cut a long story short, every small business yearns to generate sales and inquiries through its website, but few succeed.
Thus to grab the attention of the elusive target audience, it is vital to have a site which satisfies the customer’s needs and desires rather than just presenting a beautiful interface. Ideally, a well developed website must be relevant to its audience and offer the best medium of communication.
The most potent tool to realise this goal is web analytics, which provides insights into customer interactions with the website and its performance online. Both paid and organic SEO services utilise analytics to identify the weak links in usability, architecture, marketing, technology, etc.
Armed with this valuable data, you can make enhancements in your site and increase the conversions, which in turn, amplify profits and boost your small business. Let us go into the details of why web analytics is so essential for the management of an optimised and efficient website.
1. Determine The Source Of Traffic
The visitors coming to your website are directed from a variety of platforms. For instance, some of the traffic might be generated from a blog mentioning your business link. Similarly, if you have posted something on your social media profile and it is shared by your followers, you can get traffic from the friends of those followers who see your link in their news feed and are tempted to check it out.
Thus web analytics helps in understanding the source of the traffic so that you can build your future strategies around them. If you are getting maximum visitors from social media platforms, then you can increase your social media activity or start advertising on the social network.
It is quite easy to identify the source if you are using Google Analytics by going to the ‘Acquisition’ section of the tool. You will get a list of traffic source dimensions such as organic search, direct, social, referral and others. If you wish to dig deeper and find out which keywords brought the maximum traffic, then you need to go into the organic search section and get the details.
2. Find Out More About Your Visitors
Identifying the target audience is the first step for a new business which wants to grab a part of the market share. Web analytics can aid a start up in understanding the formulation of their target market and even provide their demographic and psychographic profiles besides their geographical location.
An entrepreneur can then draft business plans to further attract this segment. Conversely, the established businesses are well-aware of their customers and their behaviour. However, they need to be sure if they are attracting the right audience or not.
For example, if the product or service is intended to be used by males above 50 years of age and you are witnessing a spurt in teenage traffic, then you need to revise your digital marketing plan.
Google Analytics helps you to find out who is visiting, which device they are using, and which browser is being utilised for this purpose. So you must get your website optimised for these devices and upload content which resonates with your dedicated target audience.
3. Understand The Customer Behaviour Patterns
To ensure that your visitors spend ample time on the site, you need to enhance the user experience so that they keep coming back. It can be achieved by understanding how they are interacting with the site. The web analytics tool allows you to figure out the most popular landing pages and the pages which have a high bounce rate.
This deflection of visitors can be a result of various anomalies such as delayed loading time, hidden CTA, irrelevant content, incompatibility with mobile devices, etc. All of these problems ruin the browsing experience of the user which makes them divert.
To convert the traffic into leads, you need to provide the audience with an intuitive and engaging interface which is easy to navigate and has high-quality content with a logically visible CTA. Besides making amendments, you can also understand the inclination of the target audience through the behaviour report provided by the tool.
For example, if you are selling organic products and the maximum clicks come to the page which talks about the manufacturing process, then you know that your audience is looking for information on the composition and production of the goods. So you must give all the details in a clear and concise manner for their satisfaction, which will build their trust and lead to conversions.
4. Know How The Content Is Faring
In the digital marketing scenario, “content is the king” as it connects the marketer with the audience and builds a long lasting relationship. Unique, original, high quality, knowledgeable and relevant content is the unbeatable recipe for a successful customer driven marketing strategy.
It helps in boosting the brand image, gaining authority online, generating more leads, enhancing loyalty, lending credibility, and maximising exposure. So you need to know which content is being consumed vigorously by the users and which is being rejected with the help of analytics.
If you are publishing articles or writing blogs, you will get to know what is working in your favour and what is not through the reports. Once you get to understand the pulse of the audience, you can compile your content accordingly. Also, if you have identified that a piece of content has done well, you can recreate it in various ways such as infographics, social media posts, images, PDFs to be shared through different channels across the internet.
5. Tracking Conversions
It is immensely critical to track conversions on your website. A conversion could be the completion of a form, getting a call on the hotline number, subscribing to the newsletter, or making a purchase. The conversion report allows you to calculate your return on investment and figure out the revenue generating campaigns as well as the redundant ones that need to be removed.
This requires setting conversion goals which define what you intend to get from the customers. You need to select the ‘Goal’ option in Google Analytics which offers four categories – revenue, acquisition, inquiry and engagement.
The e-commerce sites need to track this to know how many visitors are purchasing and how many are simply browsing. This insightful data can help in salvaging a campaign and stop you from wasting money on dreary pursuits.
Conclusion
Web analytics is an indispensable tool for marketers as well as SEO consultants as it ensures that the marketing tactics are diverted towards the business goals. It gives the inside picture of the online searching, browsing and conversion game which allows the marketers to make informed decisions.
