What is web analytics?
Web analytics is the collection, measurement and reporting of activity on a website.
Its purpose is to empower the website operator the ability to monitor how the site is performing to its goals or KPIs and provide a source of insight.
Web analytics will usually measure elements like content viewed, behaviour such as abandonment, engagement and conversion to one or many defined goals. Visitor attributes such as device, browser, location are usually captured so that comparisons and trends can be established.
Basic Steps of the web analytics process
Most web analytics processes come down to five essential stages or steps which are:
- Collection of data
- Processing of data into information
- Developing KPIs
- Formulating online strategy
- Continuous improvement. Through AB testing and MVT the website operator will seek improvements by testing alternative experiences so that futher insight can be identified.
Why is web analytics so important?
Web data is often analysed to improve Marketing, merchandising, and website design.
Imagine having an online store, where you’d be completely blind in terms of what your buyers were doing? It would be very difficult to understand what improvements can be made to increase your website’s performance.
Another aspect of why web analytics is so important is the bounce rate report on specific pages in the site (for example, the sales funnel) which can be used to understand why visitors abandon the sales process prior to completion and what could be done to improve that ‘drop out’.
Some key web analytics tracking points
Typically, website operators will monitor the following key performance metrics and attributes:
Traffic Sources
Monitoring your traffic sources gives you an idea of how your website is performing within search engines, both organically (SEO) and paid search campaigns (PPC), and also what other key initiatives are driving traffic to your website. Exploring the performance of specific channels can assist in understanding the ROI and therefore changes to your investment in these areas.
Bounce Rate
This is when a visitor lands on your website and quickly leaves it without any activity, or visiting a second page (a single-page session). Knowing the web pages that have higher bounce rate can help you locate pain points of the website and mitigate it.
Traffic by devices
By knowing what percentage of users use a certain device, you can adapt the user experience, as visitors interact differently and have different purchase behaviours when browsing across desktop, tablet and mobile.
New and returning visitors
Knowing the numbers of new and returning visitors and their buying behaviour trends is important as you will be able to target specific campaigns in the exact web pages that are focal for goal completion.
Webtrends Optimize and Web Analytics
Webtrends Optimize platform can integrate seamlessly will with many of the leading web analytics platforms to complement its own reporting dashboard and suite. We can also run baseline analysis to further delve into more detail, and complex metrics, if your web analytics platform us unable to do this (or is too time consuming/complex to set up). This allows website operators to investigate test performance across a wide range of web analytics metrics and combine these learnings.
