1 - Understand your Web Analytics
Welcome to our 2016 Advent Calendar! We are sharing a marketing tip or trick every day until Christmas. To make sure you receive these updates, don't forget to register here. Happy Christmas!
Web analytics tools can be hard to get to grips with for the uninitiated, but are critical to understanding how your website is performing. Many businesses are missing an opportunity; as according to BuiltWith statistics, only.4% of all 348 million websites use Google Analytics. But there's much to be gained; most of the top 10,000 sites do use it (69.5% of Quantcast’s, based on traffic) to interpret data and help inform business decisions.
Google Analytics is free (for the standard product), making the measurement, collection and analysis of website data and statistics a whole lot simper. The interface allows you to see where traffic is coming from and how people are behaving on the site and optimise accordingly. Google Analytics helps a business owner or marketing director understand;
- Website visitor count / traffic
- Website visitor location
- User friendliness
- Traffic referral
- Popular website pages
- Conversion rate
- Website speed
- Most popular blog content
- Engagement rate (for example bounce rates and number of pages browsed)
- And many more...
Analytics are key in finding out how your website performs. Understanding the data can allow you to form a strategy, for example driving your best traffic to your most popular pages and ultimately convert the traffic into customers!
Top tip: Get bespoke
Once you've got to grips with the basic KPIs you'll want to understand more and more about your data! We recommend setting up goals to track each conversion you're looking to create, and can create custom reports to your particular requirements.
Getting traffic to your website is the hard part. Once you have traffic, you have leads. Understanding your website traffic is vitally important - to know the customers' journey and being able to adapt is the secret to conversion. Don't skip the analysis or you won't reap the rewards of your hard-earned traffic.
That's all for today. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks from our free advent calendar.