When you are trying to market online, there are no benefits to being in the dark. If you have tools available for you to use in order to help your business grow, why not take advantage of them? Truth be told, there are many ways that businesses can benefit from using analytics on their website.
In this article, we will go over exactly how businesses benefit from using analytics on their websites. By paying attention to these key metrics, you can help ensure that your website remains visible online, keeps people interested, and directs people to buy your products or services.
What Are Website Analytics?
Analytics of a website includes the collection of data related to your website and then the reporting of that data to you, the website owner. Website analytics can include your overall web traffic, the time that your website visitors spend on your website, and where they came from.
As well, analytics can contain demographic information, the location of your visitors, and even more. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information.
What Can Using Analytics Tell You?
We’ve already gone over the fact that there is seemingly no end to the amount of data that can be collected about your website traffic, but what can analytics really tell you? This part of using your analytics can be a little tricky. That is, you are going to have to learn how to read your website analytics.
Website analytics can also tell you what parts of your content are the most popular. If your website is a news site or a blog site, you might be earning hits on certain articles but not others! This is an incredibly valuable piece of information for your site.
You could also learn which methods of online advertising are successful for your business. If you are running advertisements on multiple social media sites, you can see the sources of your web traffic directly from your own website’s analytics. This is a huge time saver.
Similarly, you may be able to see which of your businesses’ social media accounts is the most successful at bringing you web traffic.
Finally, and most importantly, you can track the changes that you are making to your website in real time. If you are looking to add a new feature or product to your website, you should be tracking your website to see the numbers before and after these new additions!
How Can You Implement Changes Based on Using Analytics?
Making decisions based on your analytics can be stressful, but if you are not seeing the results that you want for your website it might be time to make some changes. Increasing views will increase sales depending on how you implement changes.
We don’t recommend that you make too many changes to your website all at once. This is because you may not be able to properly read your analytics after you make multiple changes at the same time. If you make many changes at once to your website, you may find yourself unable to tell what changes were successful and what changes left more to be desired from your site visitor.
The best way to implement changes to your website is to identify the primary problem with your website. Consider if your issue is lack of web traffic, you may need to increase your efforts with SEO in order to achieve higher online visibility.
You might be seeing people get tired of clicking through your many menu options, this might mean that you should try to simplify the navigation of your website. To put it simply, there are so many things that could go wrong with your website that analytics can tell you. Let’s get into what the best metrics to look at are and how they can help you make changes to your website.
What Are the Best Analytics to Look At?
In this section, we will discuss the top two best pieces of information to view from your analytics in order to avoid information overload and focus on the essentials of website analytics. As you continue to use website analytics to measure progress for your website, however, you should try to learn more of the obscure data points!
Pageviews
Pageviews as a metric is pretty straightforward. A single pageview is a single time in which a person loaded your website up on their device. If someone were to leave and then come back and visit your website multiple times, this would count as multiple pageviews.
As well, if someone were to visit multiple pages on your website, this would also count as multiple pageviews. Each time your website is loaded on their device, it is a new pageview.
This is a great way to know the total number that your website is being used. You should know how often people are using your site. This metric will especially help you to track if website changes are effective.
Traffic Sources
We’ve talked about this metric before in this article as an example for just how useful analytics can be! If you are wanting to figure out just how people are finding your website, this is the metric that will tell you where your visitors are coming from.
You can use this data point to see if your advertisements are working or if your social media accounts are helping you to drive traffic to your site. This is also a great metric to see if you are receiving traffic from sources that you may not be aware of.
Knowing how your visitors are finding you might just be the thing that you need to know in order to pivot and capture more sales of your products and services.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you are seriously missing out on the benefits of website analytics if you are not focusing on analytics to grow your business. We hope that this article helped to teach you more about how your business can benefit from the use of website analytics.