The most effective business strategies are fully informed with actual data. Website analytics provide you with information regarding who your site visitors are and how they behave once on your website. The data can segment visitors by age, gender, location, and what traffic sources brought them to your website. It can tell you the total number of conversions, which of your site content is most popular, and more. All of this information can be analyzed and interpreted to grow your business.
WHY Website analytics are important for your business growth:
Understand Who Are Your Visitors to Improve User Experience
By understanding more about your website visitors, you can enhance their user experience as you are working to attract new users. You can customize aspects of your website to meet the needs of the age and interest groups identified by your site analytics. You can confirm the need to be device responsive and mobile-friendly by understanding the breakdown of the technology being used to access your site. And you can identify the location and language of the majority of your site visitors to understand if you might need to create translations for your site to meet those needs.
When you take measures to improve user experience based on what you know about your site visitors’ age, gender, location, interests, and so on, you increase the odds that visitors will stay longer on your site. A number of studies have shown that increased stay time will ultimately result in higher conversion rates. Increased user experience also improves the brand-customer relationship and helps to build trust and loyalty amongst your customers.
Understand Which Content Performs Best
You can use website analytics tools to determine which content works and which doesn’t. This allows you to focus on creating the types of content that receive more visitors and engagement so you can increase your overall site engagement and acquire more customers. The analytics tools show the visit rate, average duration, and bounce rate for each web page. This information can help you optimize your pages with call to action buttons and other strategies that help to boost your conversion rates.
Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is one of the more important aspects of your website as organic traffic only serves to increase the number of leads and conversions. By understanding more about your visitors and creating engaging content, you receive better visibility on search engines. The analytics tools can provide data regarding impressions, total clicks, the average click-through-rate, and more. This helps you understand which search queries are sending you the most traffic, what visitors are looking for on your site and whether or not their expectations are being met once they are there. The website analytics can also help you track and analyze who is referring the traffic your website is receiving so you can focus on strategies to continuing earning referrals from them.
Create Partnership Opportunities from Your Top Outbound Links
Building productive business partnerships is an effective strategy to help grow your brand. Website analytics not only provide data regarding inbound traffic but they also provide information regarding outbound links. The analytics tools show you the top links clicked on your website which enables you to reach out to those other businesses that might find cross-promotions or other strategies to be mutually beneficial. As you have those conversations, it is helpful to be able to show the other business owners the data that supports your suggestion of a partnership.
Track and Respond to Ecommerce Metrics
The sales reports generated by website analytics tools provide some of the most important information about your business. The data inform you of your top selling products or services, total revenue, conversion rates, and so on. You can then utilize this information to create strategies that will further enhance your ecommerce sales. The analytics tools allow you to customize the reports generated so you are looking at the metrics most important to the growth and success of your business.
WHICH Website Analytics Tool Should You Use?
Until this point, we’ve been using the generic phrase of “website analytics tools” but we understand that some of you may be wondering which of those tools might be best for your business. The answer to that question depends on your budget and level of technological knowledge. We’ll review just a few of the many resources out there to help get you started on this important conversation.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools available and as is true with most Google resources, it is free. Website platforms such as Squarespace easily interact with Google Analytics and the combination of resources provide you with advanced options for reporting and a fairly intuitive dashboard setup. While many businesses rely solely on Google Analytics and their platform that hosts their website, there are other tools that expand and complement what Google Analytics can do for you.
PaveAI
A common issue that some business owners are unaware of is the fact that spammers that visit a website inaccurately drive up the number of page views by hiding in the traffic reports. PaveAI provides you a clean view of your traffic levels by removing the fake traffic from your analytic reports. PaveAI works in conjunction with Google Analytics, continually adds new filters once referrer spam is detected, and is completely free.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed is one of the free Google tools available. PageSpeed allows you to determine how quickly or slowly your website pages load. A slow website not only puts you on bad terms with impatient site visitors but it also negatively impacts your standing with search engines. PageSpeed Insights not only reports on page load times for both mobile and desktop devices, but it also provides suggestions on how a web page may be improved to decrease the load time.
Pingdom
Pingdom is an alternative to Googles’ PageSpeed Insights. It also tests web pages for factors that may be causing slow loading times. Pingdom lets you monitor and manage the performance, user interactions, and uptime of your website and also offers the service of monitoring your site and server for latency issues. The company offers a 14-day free trial. Their pricing begins at $11.95 per month for a basic package and goes upwards of $199 per month for their “Professional” package.
ClickMeter
ClickMeter is another resource that works in conjunction with Google Analytics. This tool lets you create pretty URLs. ClickMeter then allows you to redirect, track, and analyze website traffic using over 100 different parameters. The data help you understand the performance of your marketing efforts so you can duplicate the channels that are converting and eliminate those that are not. ClickMeter has a wide pricing range of $29-$349 per month depending on the package purchased.
SEMrush
SEMrush offers a suite of SEO tools that let you see the results of your SEO marketing efforts. SEMrush provides you information on what your brand will need to do to out-rank your competitors by analyzing your competition and diving deep into your own data. It looks at your backlinks, allows you to monitor your brand name as well as your social media marketing, and performs keyword gap analysis, too. SEMrush is one of the more expensive tools, starting at just under $100 per month and the pricing goes up from there.
Moz Keyword Explorer
Moz Keyword Explorer is similar to SEMrush and can be used in conjunction with Google Analytics. Moz Keyword Explorer gives you the ability to view backlinks and explore linking opportunities and provides a competitor analysis that lets you find new content and keyword ideas based on that analysis. Moz offers a 30-day free trial. The packages start at $99 per month.
Visual Website Optimizer
Visual Website Optimizer provides the resources you need to perform A/B testing on different textual and graphical elements on your web pages. It also lets you record visitor sessions for the purpose of playback analysis. An example provided for this feature tells of a business was able to decrease their bounce rate once they discovered a critical shipping error that was occurring randomly throughout the day. Visual Website Optimizer does offer a free trial and requests direct contact to learn more about pricing.
Google Content Experiments
Google Content Experiments, working in conjunction with Google Analytics, is another option for a tool that helps you A/B test your landing pages to understand the conversion rates of your various landing pages. In the spirit of Google resources, it is easy to use and is free.
Website analytics provide data about your website so you are better able to:
Understand Who Are Your Visitors to Improve User Experience
Understand Which Content Performs Best
Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Create Partnership Opportunities from Your Top Outbound Links
Track and Respond to Ecommerce Metrics
There are a number of resources available to provide you the website analytics you need. From free tools offered by Google to more expensive options that offer data services covering all aspects of your website’s performance. The team at Strategy Driven Marketing understands the importance of website analytics and love to deep dive into data to help our clients understand what is working, what isn’t working, and how best to move forward. Contact us today to learn more about what we can do for your brand!
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