The average website conversion rate is 2.35%, which means that only two out of every hundred visitors will convert. There are several factors you need to figure out if you want to boost your conversion rate and increase your revenue.
Understanding who your visitors are and where they are coming from, for example, will assist you in tailoring your message to be more relevant to them. Recognising how they communicate with your website can help improve your UX and UI and reduce conversion friction.
How do you go about doing this? By using web analytics tools. These tools will allow you to assess and analyse the performance of your website.
Using the data provided by web analytics tools, you can optimise your website and encourage more visitors to take action. Continue reading to learn more!
What is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is the method of gathering, processing, and analysing data from websites.
With Web analytics, you can genuinely see how effective your marketing campaigns have been, identify and improve problems in our online services, and create customer profiles to increase the profitability of our advertising and sales efforts.
Every successful business is built on the ability to comprehend and apply data provided by customers, competitors, and partners.
Fundamental Metrics of Google Analytics
Before you continue reading, keep in mind that different analytics tools may have slightly varying definitions of the following metrics. It’s best to read the documentation for your specific tool to understand how each is derived.
1. Pageviews
Pageviews are the total number of times a page on your site was viewed. When a browser loads a page on your site, it counts as a pageview (or view). So, if someone views a page on your site and then reloads the page in their browser, that counts as two views.
If a visitor views one page, then another page on your website, and then returns to the original page, that counts as three views.
2. Unique pageviews
Unique pageviews are the total number of times a web page was viewed by users in a single session. In other words, a unique pageview is a collection of pageviews generated by a single user during a session (as defined below).
So, if a person views the same page twice (or more) in a single session, unique pageviews only count that pageview once.
3. Sessions
A session is a group of interactions that occur on your website within a specific time frame, including not only page views but also activities such as CTA clicks and events.
4. New visitors
The number of unique visitors on your website is referred to as new visitors — also known as new users, unique visitors, or new visitor sessions, depending on the web analytics tools.
A new visitor is someone who comes to your website for the first time, as the name implies. A healthy website will attract a steady stream of new visitors over time to compensate for those who lose interest.
5. Returning visitors
Returning visitors (or users) are those who have previously visited your website. This metric is not included in all web analytics tools, but some do, including Google Analytics.
You can look at behaviours in Google Analytics’ Audience reports to see the ratio of new to returning users on your site.
6. Traffic sources
The traffic sources on your website show where your visitors are coming from. This metric, like visitor information, is typically collected via the tracking code on your site.
Depending on the web analytics tool, the number of traffic sources you can track will vary. Examples of traffic sources include organic search, paid search, organic social, paid social, referral, email, direct traffic, etc.
7. Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page is known as the bounce rate. Bounce rate can be viewed as a site-wide or page-level metric.
The bounce rate at the page level is the percentage of sessions that began on the page but did not proceed to another page on your site.
Also Read: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Successful Digital Marketing Plan in 2023
Importance of Web Analytics
Are you wondering why web analytics is so important? Simply put, they assist business owners in the following tasks:
- Discover how your visitors find you
- Discover who your visitors are
- Learn how visitors interact with your website
- Determine your best-performing content
- Keep track of conversions
1. Discover how your visitors find you
Visitors to the site typically come from a variety of sources. If someone has written an article about your company, readers may click through that blog entry to your site.
If you’re active on social media and have a devoted following who always share and leave comments on your posts, their friends may become curious and visit your website to learn more.
Hence, it’s critical to understand the broad breakdown of how these various channels contribute to your traffic so you can prioritise your efforts and fine-tune your marketing plan. Here is where web analytics tools come in handy!
2. Discover who your visitors are
If you’re new to running a business, you may still not know who your ideal customer is. If this is the case, learning about the types of people who visit your site can help you narrow down your target audience.
What if you’re a well-known brand that knows who your ideal customer is? It still is beneficial to keep track of who is visiting your website. It ensures there is no mismatch between who you believe you are attracting to your site and who you are attracting.
A web analytics tool like Google Analytics can help you figure out who your visitors are.
You’ll be able to gather information about your site visitors’ demographics (such as age and gender), geography, interests, and hobbies.
In addition, Google Analytics informs you about the browsers and devices used by your visitors. For instance, if you notice that a large percentage of your visitors are visiting your website through tablets, you’ll want to ensure that your website works properly on these devices.
3. Learn how visitors interact with your website
Once you’ve determined who your visitors are and where they’re coming from, you need to figure out how they engage with your site.
Check out the “Behavior” section in Google Analytics to see how your visitors engage with your site. The flow shown in the screenshot above depicts which pages your visitors land on and which they click through to next.
Assume you run a SaaS company and notice that the first page your visitors click through to is your Pricing page. It may indicate that your customers are price-sensitive; with this in mind, you may want to give your visitors a 30-day free option so that you can convert them to users first, and then upsell them later.
4. Determine your best-performing content
Pareto’s principle (also known as the 80/20 rule!) states that in most cases, 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. Let us now apply this to your content strategy.
You probably already conduct keyword research and publish only high-quality, well-written blog articles, but that doesn’t change the fact that some of your articles will fail, and others will unexpectedly become a big hit.
How do you recognise your best-performing content and determine which articles drive your website’s traffic? You can examine the number of Comments and Shares you receive on your articles if you post them on Facebook, but a more accurate way to do this is to keep track of the numbers using Google Analytics.
Even after you’ve ascertained your top-performing content, there’s more work to be done. First, examine these pages or articles to see if any patterns emerge. Then, fine-tune your content strategy and begin producing more of that specific type of content.
Furthermore, you’ll want to milk your best-performing content for all it’s worth. For example, if you wrote an article titled “An Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Basics in 2023,” keep updating it and changing the title to reflect the new year.
You can also repurpose your content by converting it into multiple formats, such as infographics, e-books, etc.
5. Keep track of conversions
The final reason web analytics is crucial is that they allow you to track conversions. Your website must successfully convert visitors at the heart of it all. In the same light, it’s critical to use a web analytics tool to track your conversions; this allows you to optimise your site and boost your conversion rate.
How to Create an Effective Web Analytics Strategy?
The first time most beginners open Google Analytics, they are terrified.
It’s terrifying!
They believe they will have all the data required to make sense of what is going on in their business, but that is not the case.
The problem is that there’s so much data in Google Analytics that most people don’t know where to begin.
The hardest aspect of web analytics is getting past the overwhelm that prevents you from deriving insights from your data and making decisions that will help your business grow.
Fortunately, there is a solution: instead of attempting to track and interpret hundreds of metrics at once, you can achieve massive outcomes for your company by tirelessly concentrating on five or fewer metrics.
If you’re just getting started, you can do so by using the following framework:
- Understand the fundamentals of web analytics tracking
- Understand analytics
- Create a measurement plan
- Implement your measurement plan
Let us take a closer look at each of these.
1. Understand the fundamentals of web analytics tracking
Countless digital marketers make the mistake of diving into web analytics without first learning how to track website visitors.
It is a bit technical, but you don’t have to be a programmer to understand it.
On the other hand, if you invest the time in learning this, everything will be a lot easier later on.
A web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, works in three basic steps:
Data collection
Website owners or webmasters must set up a tracking code on their site to use Google Analytics.
This code tracks visitor interactions on the site, such as pages visited, clicks on specific page elements, and even purchase transactions.
The ability to distinguish one visitor from another is an important feature of the tracking code. For instance, whether two pages were visited by the same user or by different users.
To accomplish this, the tracking code places a small snippet of code known as a cookie in each of your visitors’ browsers (e.g. Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.)
Consider this cookie to be a name tag with an anonymous but unique name associated with a specific browser.
Data transmission
The tracking code then sends the interaction data, along with the user information it has, to Google Analytics.
Data processing
Finally, Google Analytics analyses all the data it gathers, computes the metrics and then displays the results in the form of reports.
When you log into your Google Analytics account, you will see these reports.
2. Understanding analytics
When you first open Google Analytics, it can be difficult to make sense of all the reports and metrics displayed.
Fortunately, these reports are divided into four categories:
- A: stands for audience
- A: stands for acquisition
- B: stands for behaviour, and
- C: stands for conversion
With the AABC approach, you can group metrics and reports in a way that makes analysing the performance of your sales funnel easier.
Audience reports include metrics about your visitors that can assist you in defining your target persona.
It includes information, including age, gender, location, language, and hobbies.
Acquisition reports show you the origins of your visitors. It is useful for analysing the performance of your funnel’s top.
It includes reports on traffic sources and the performance of specific campaigns (e.g., Facebook Ads).
Behaviour reports show you what your site visitors do once they arrive. This information is critical for understanding the middle and bottom of your funnel.
This includes reports on your website’s most popular landing and exit pages, as well as the most common behaviour flows.
Conversion reports demonstrate how important conversions are on your website. This information will be used to analyse the middle and bottom of your funnel.
Reports on goal conversion rates, revenue, or sales per product are examples of this.
Take some time to become acquainted with the various reports within each group.
You don’t need to understand or even delve deeply into each of them just yet, but understanding what’s available in the tool is critical for the next step in developing a web analytics strategy.
Also Read: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Sales Funnel in 2023
3. Create a measurement plan
Things start to get interesting at this point.
Your measurement plan should be a simple document that will enable you to maintain a laser-like focus on what is truly important to your business.
By putting your measurement plan into action, you will be able to rapidly assess the health of your entire business, recognise when something is wrong, and even determine if campaigns are having a positive impact. Everything would have taken hours if you hadn’t used this framework.
To develop a measurement plan, follow these four steps:
- Establish your company’s objectives.
- Determine proxies for those business objectives.
- Select key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor performance.
- Develop relevant segments.
If this is your first time creating a measurement plan, start with your sales funnel.
Let’s go over each of these in detail.
3.1 Establish your company’s objectives
The first step is to identify the most important goals for the company.
You’ll determine the most important goal for each stage of the funnel while creating a measurement plan for your sales funnel.
You can only select one goal per stage of the funnel.
- Top-of-the-funnel goal: Increase visibility and awareness of our company within a geographic area
- Middle-of-the-funnel goal: Acquire leads from people who are interested in your offering
- Bottom-of-funnel goal: Increase customer loyalty
- Monetisation, retention, and love goal: Increase customer loyalty
We’re just getting started, but if you’re keeping up, your measurement plan should look something like this.
Most business owners are overly focused on the bottom-of-the-funnel goal of sales or revenue.
You’d know when sales were up or down if you did this, but it’d be difficult to figure out why.
By charting a goal for each stage of the funnel, you can get a complete picture of your company’s health.
This way, you can address issues (such as a decrease in the number of leads collected) before they negatively impact your bottom line.
3.2 Determine proxies for those business objectives
Now that you’ve determined your most important business objectives, it’s time to identify proxies for each of them.
Business goals are broad aspirational objectives, and as such, they are somewhat ambiguous.
After all, visibility and customer loyalty are impossible to quantify.
Proxies can assist you in resolving the vagueness issue.
Proxies are actions or events that occur on your website that assist you in translating your goals into something measurable.
A proxy for visibility could be the amount of new traffic to your website; a proxy for loyalty could be the number of repeat customers.
To keep things simple, limit yourself to no more than two proxies per business goal. So now, the measurement plan will look like this:
- Top-of-the-funnel goal: Increase visibility and awareness of our company within a geographic area
- Proxy: Traffic from new visitors
- Middle-of-the-funnel goal: Acquire leads from people who are interested in your offering
- Proxy: Email signups
- Bottom-of-funnel goal: Increase customer loyalty
- Proxy: Sales/purchases
- Monetisation, retention, and love goal: Increase customer loyalty
- Proxy: Repeat purchases
Finding proxies for business goals may require some creativity, but with practice, you will become more adept.
Choosing proxies, like the previous step, will force you to concentrate on getting your site visitors to perform only a few events or actions. So, if something isn’t on the list, don’t waste time or resources on it.
3.3 Select key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor performance
You’ve documented your most essential business goals and outlined proxies that will help you measure them.
The time has come to allocate KPIs to each proxy.
KPIs enable you to translate actions on your site (also known as proxies) into metrics that Google Analytics can easily find and read.
To put it another way, you’re converting words into numbers.
Assume you want to track email signups.
There are two ways you can do this if you have a form on your site where users can enter their email addresses to sign up for your newsletter or download a freebie:
You could keep track of how many visitors click on a button to submit the form.
You could keep track of how many people visit the thank you page after submitting the form.
Either of these is a good KPI for email signups because they are simple to set up and track in Google Analytics.
To keep things simple, limit yourself to three KPIs per business goal. So here’s how your measurement strategy will look:
- Top-of-the-funnel goal: Increase visibility and awareness of our company within a geographic area
- Proxy: Traffic from new visitors
- KPI 1: Number of new visitors
- KPI 2: Percentage of new visitors
- Proxy: Traffic from new visitors
- Middle-of-the-funnel goal: Acquire leads from people who are interested in your offering
- Proxy: Email signups
- KPI: Visits to the email signup thank you page
- Proxy: Email signups
- Bottom-of-funnel goal: Generate leads
- Proxy: Sales/purchases
- KPI 1: Total revenue
- KPI 2: Number of transactions
- Proxy: Sales/purchases
- Monetisation, retention, and love goal: Increase customer loyalty
- Proxy: Repeat purchases
- KPI 1: Customer lifetime value
- KPI 2: Average number of transactions per user
- Proxy: Repeat purchases
3.4 Develop relevant segments
You’ve developed business goals, identified proxies for those goals, and developed KPIs that allow you to easily measure success in Google Analytics.
If you’ve made it this far, you already have a better web analytics strategy than 99.9% of businesses.
Congrats!
That being said, this final step is what will propel you to the top 1% of web analysts.
Segments are a method for identifying and excluding specific groups of visitors during data analysis.
Every website visitor is not the same. Most websites have:
- Mobile vs. desktop users
- New visitors vs. returning visitors
- Customers vs. non-customers
- Paid traffic vs. organic traffic vs. social traffic vs. email traffic
- Visitors interested in a specific product
- Visitors in different funnel stages
These are only a few examples.
By segmenting your visitors, you can discover trends or insights that you might have missed if you were only going to look at an aggregate of all your data.
For example, you may discover that mobile users purchase more frequently than desktop users. Perhaps current customers are stuck at a certain point in the purchasing process.
Segments aren’t specific to a business goal, but rather ways to examine your entire operation through the eyes of a specific group of website visitors.
Your measurement strategy not only simplifies how you think about analytics; it also forces you to concentrate all of your digital marketing efforts.
- If a campaign you’re running has no direct or indirect impact on the metrics on your measurement plan, that’s a sign you shouldn’t run it.
- If, on the other hand, you find yourself spending a lot of time and resources trying to improve a metric that isn’t in the plan, consider whether this metric should be replaced by another that is in the plan.
4. Implement your measurement plan
Once you’ve developed your strategy, it’s time to put it into action so you can easily track these metrics within Google Analytics.
In some cases, you will be able to find your key performance indicators in Google Analytics without having to do anything else.
This is true for metrics such as users, new users, % new users, bounce rates, and page views.
In some cases, tailored events or Google Analytics goals may be required.
Note: When we talk about Google Analytics goals, we don’t mean the business objectives in your measurement plan. Goals are defined by Google Analytics as actions or events that assess how well your site or app meets your target objectives. You can opt to set up a few of your KPIs as Google Analytics goals in the case of your measurement plan.
For example, if your measurement strategy includes KPIs such as button clicks, session time, purchases, or pages per session, you will have to manually configure these.
Once you’ve done that, Google Analytics will calculate some other useful metrics for you, such as conversion rate per goal or revenue per channel.
This is possibly the most technically difficult aspect of your web analytics strategy.
After you’ve established your KPIs, it’s time to create some segments.
Finally, you should monitor every effort your business makes to bring visitors to your website, allowing you to identify and analyse campaigns. You can accomplish this by including UTM parameters in your campaign URLs.
That’s all! You’ve created and applied a comprehensive sales funnel measurement strategy.
This straightforward and effective framework will enable you to concentrate on what makes a difference and use data to make better decisions and grow your business.
Once you’ve nailed this one and are confident that you’re tracking what truly matters, you can apply the same conceptual model to specific areas of digital marketing.
The measurement plan framework, for example, can be used to assess any particular digital marketing channel, such as email marketing, content marketing, SEO, paid advertising, and social media.
Also Read: The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing (SMM) in 2023
Web Analytics: Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What are the two primary types of web analytics?
1. On-site web analytics: Provides information about how visitors interact with your website and what content they find interesting. It enables you to evaluate the effectiveness of your content strategy and marketing campaigns. The data is obtained directly from your website, hence the term “on-site.”
2. Off-site web analytics: Provides data that does not originate from your site, hence the term “off-site.” Off-site data allows you to learn about the size of your potential target audience as well as how well your website performs in comparison to your competitors. When most people hear the term “web analytics,” they envision on-site analytics.
Q2. What is benchmarking in web analytics?
Benchmarking is a service that compares your website’s performance to that of others.
Q3. What is a returning visitor in web analytics?
A returning visitor is someone who has previously visited your page. Returning visitors are beneficial to any website.
On a Concluding Note
Web analytics can help you and your company grow whether you are a small business, eCommerce site, or enterprise company. You can improve the user experience on your website and meet larger business objectives such as increasing online sales by collecting, reporting, and analysing data about your website.
If you wish to learn more about such topics, you can read our knowledge base blogs and apply your learning to your business.
