Web Analytics for Beginners
Web analytics has the potential to improve your website’s performance in ways that you’ve yet to imagine. It all starts with raw data: T he numbers that illustrate how and why visitors use your website can give you invaluable insight into how to attract more visitors and keep them there. If you run a business, you’ll be able to streamline marketing and advertising campaigns and increase your profits. Despite certain data being readily available in most control panels, proper analytics should be left up to trained professionals. With this data and its correct interpretation in hand, your website can reach the audience it needs to be an undeniable success.
What is Web Analytics?
Simply put, Web analytics is the gathering and study of information about website usage and traffic. The results and analysis of this information are then put to use by optimizing content to increase usability, attract more visitors and improve the efficacy of marketing and advertising efforts. For online businesses, Web analytics can be the crux of a good sales strategy, and constant monitoring of data and content modifications can be required to correctly anticipate target audience behavior in their respective industries. Brick-and-mortar stores can also use analytics to help them assess how well they reach prospects and customers in the digital world and gain insight into how an online storefront may fare among competitors.
The Basics of Web Analytics
Web analytics measure all pertinent information regarding prospect, customer and visitor activity on a Web page. This detailed on-site analysis, which includes everything from clicking behavior to time spent on pages, provides a detailed account of how users behave when presented with specific content or choices. Web analytics can even be an indispensable tool for businesses that have yet to create a website. Off-site analytics, for example, can gauge interest in a potential website based on Internet mentions, buzz, popularity, or market appeal.
In an effort to constantly shift content to make it as appealing as it can be to users, businesses may choose to regularly conduct testing that changes different components of a website and measures how users react to them. It’s through this type of testing that companies can gain insight into which types of marketing and advertising work best. As a result, a significant increase in profits can be experienced. A common aspect of this type of testing includes landing pages, which can illustrate how and why users have arrived at the business’s website.
Why Do Web Analytics Matter?
Proper Web analytics have the potential of increasing your bottom line or other types of important currency within your industry, such as authority and influence. Taking the time to analyze how your website can and does perform on the Internet can give you an advantage over your competitors and help position you as an industry leader. Even groups that function outside of the realm of direct profits, such as volunteer organizations or bloggers, can use metrics to increase their viewership and get visitors to perform specific actions. In a seemingly amorphous space such as the Internet, Web analytics provide hard metrics that point to user responses and give specific explanations for their behavior.
Who Manages Web Analytics?
Much of the raw data that goes into Web analytics is processed and reported by complex software programs. The interpretation of this data, however, can be left up to professionals who have been specifically trained to analyze it and determine what it means in reference to a business’s specific goals. Some Web analysts have earned degrees in this discipline from business or computer science schools. Since this type of research and analysis can be complex, it can be best to leave it up to someone who has been adequately trained for it.
What Results Can You Expect?
In many cases, Web analytics are only as good as their interpreters. Software that doesn’t take certain aspects of data into account for reporting can be missing out on important niche information that can give business owners the advantage of reaching specific markets. Similarly, professionals who’ve undergone different methods of training may approach Web analytics differently. For example, some analysts who’ve been educated in business schools may also be trained in marketing and associated platforms, like social media, and can directly link data with performance in these areas. Like other professionals, those who engage in Web analytics have to stay on top of internet innovations to properly interpret the data that they’re seeing. If you hire an analyst who remains on the cutting edge of their specialty and of Internet trends, you’ll have a clearer picture of what your data means in your day-to-day market and a better grasp of how to apply metrics for future marketing campaigns to increase your profits.