How can you best analyse where your website traffic is coming from and if it’s beneficial for your website or not?
For anyone who owns a website, understanding basic web analytics is important. Website analytics allows you to generate reports and collect data generated by your users.
By analysing, you can see the types of behaviour your users show on your websites, the keywords that they found you by and their overall experience.
From looking at your overall traffic, new users and returning users, alongside other data such as how much time your visitors spent on your website. You can also decipher what devices your potential customer is using while looking at your website – desktop or mobile – and the bounce rate of your pages.
The amount of data you can collect is endless and understanding this data or metrics as they are commonly known, is important. This gives business owners huge amounts of insights that can help increase sales and conversions.
There are plenty of great website analytics tools available for business owners. Most are free and can offer easy to understand analytics when it comes to looking into the finer points of your website’s functionality.
Google Analytics is probably the most well-known analytics tool on the web, however many other wonderful providers that can offer easy to digest information on how your website is performing.
Let’s Talk Traffic
Traffic is still incredibly important – as, after all, it will determine all of your data. But as websites have evolved, marketing specialists want to know more about this traffic.
Where did it come from?
How long did they stay?
What were they looking at?
How much of this traffic converted into a sale?
How much did it cost us to get this visitor?
Analysing this traffic can allow businesses to see which areas their website is performing, and which areas need a little work.
This information can allow you to make good choices when it comes to a possible website redesign for easier use or looking at popular pages and utilising those keywords more into the website.
Getting a good clear understanding of what your users are doing on your page can allow you to tweak areas for a better result.
Let’s look at the top data areas to review for a website:
Bounce Rate – users who leave your website after only viewing one page. Basically, the visitor only saw one page then left your website.
Unique Visitors – first time user of your page.
Returning Visitors – a user who is returning to your page.
Page Views – the amount of time a page was viewed on your website. This is a great tool to better understand what your audience is looking at on your website while also allowing you to better understand how well that page is optimised in SEO.
Unique Pageviews – how many times a page was viewed by a user in one single session. Allows you to see how popular certain pages are.
Sessions/visits – a group of interactions on your page (normally over a 30minute period). One single session can consist of many things – think different page views, Call to Action (CTA), clicking links to newsletters or sign-up, sales and social interactions. It is a collection of page views.
Traffic – you can analyse different forms of traffic, the main ones being; organic and paid searches, social (paid and organic), email and direct traffic. You can determine from this what is working and what is not. It is important when it comes to traffic to be driving from all angles and getting good results from all sources to increase your website’s performance and leads.
It’s essential when starting out that you have a good understanding of what you want to track. You can become easily bombarded with a whole lot of data that can seem overwhelming and not in your business objective to what you are trying to achieve.
Consider what you want to do with the data? What is the core objective of your analytics? Get more conversations? Drive more traffic? Or possibly reduce the bounce rate and look at a redesign of your website?
When you have a clear understanding of what you want to improve you can set your analytics to better understand what is working and what is not and then monitor the effects once you’ve made your changes.
Why Analyse a Website?
By analysing your website, you can understand how your users are interacting. While getting a clear picture of what they are searching for, reading, and reacting with. You can also get wonderful insights into what pages are functioning, and why.
Getting a grasp on what the user is typically behaving like – either leaving your page quickly or clicking through to more information or better still a conversion for sales. It allows you to see what pages are best performing and which ones are not. This can also be a vital tool during promotional periods.
If you have a high bounce rate, ask yourself why? Could your website need a redesign? Are people finding it hard to navigate? If you have a high rate of mobile phone users is your website mobile-friendly or does this need a little tweaking? Having this information at your fingertips is vital to increasing your website’s functionality and use.
Website analytics can be as in-depth or as simple as you require. The most important thing is to ask yourself the question of what your main goal is with the data.
Better traffic? More conversions? Etc. Having a clear goal will allow you to set your analytics so that you can better monitor what is working and what is not.
Need some help? Get in touch with SEO Specialist Doreen Brown today.