Most Web Analytics tools can tell you what information about the user?

There are a ton of questions that people ask around web analytics. For example, what is that analytics? What are the different types of web analytics? What is the web analytics process? Is web analytics a good career option? Most Web Analytics tools can tell you what information about the user?

What do you mean by Web Analytics?

The word web analytics consists of two parts, web and analytics. Web means everything online, that is on website. Analytics means to analyze something and to find out meaningful information about the website or any other content? Hence, web analytics is nothing but a process of identifying and investigating the performance of our content on the internet, specifically our website.

In addition, the idea behind performing web analytics on your website is to find out areas of improvement, improvise your strategy and re-implement better ways to do things. It is a continuous process that helps you to refine your presence on the internet. Web analysis helps to achieve your goals.

What are the Different Types of Web Analytics?

Primarily there are two types of web analytics. The first one is on your website or on-site web analytics. The other is everything outside your website or off-site web analytics.

On-site web analytics focuses on your audience, their sources, behavior, engagement on your website. Generally, by default, people refer to web analytics as on-site analysis. The objective is to compare the actual audience metrics against the KPIs or the key performance indicators.

Off-site web analytics primarily focuses on your overall visibility on different platforms. You want to make sure that your website is visible on all the crucial search engines, for example, Yahoo, Bing, Google. It also means optimizing your off-site metrics for better performance and visibility.

Web Analytics Process

So the question is, what do you do exactly to audit your website? The process of web analytics is simple. It begins with you deciding on your goals. What do you want to achieve from your website? Do you want more website traffic? Or are you looking at conversion/sales? Once you have identified your smart goals, the next step is to define your KPIs or key performance indicators.

These key performance indicators are nothing but the metrics against which you will measure your actual performance. It also helps you guide the next steps you take to improve your customer experience on the website. The next step in this process is to collect data from your website. There are different ways to collect data of users from the website. Web analytics tools available out there can help you achieve this, for example, Google Analytics.

While collecting data, make sure that you eliminate your visits or the visits of your employees to the company website. It will help you reduce duplication and keep the data accurate. The next logical step in the process is to review the data you have collected. You must analyze different things like how long do your customers stay on your website? From where do they come? from which city or country are they visiting you? What devices are they using? How long does each of the visits last?

Tip

Make changes according to what you have learnt during the analysis. For example, during the analysis period, you find out that certain pages of your website are the key reasons your visitors leave your website. You want to make sure that you identify those pages and rework those pages for better page retention. The more they hang around on your website, the better the possibility for you to create engagement or generate sales. Lastly, pull out the reports of your reworked strategy and see if there is any difference from the last analysis or not. It is a continuous process and, the cycle goes on and on forever till the time you are in business online.

Web Analytics Tools

There are various tools available on the internet, both free and paid to analyze and optimize your website.

Google Analytics

As I mentioned, Google Analytics is one of the free and widely used tools today. Since most of the search engine market share is dominated by Google worldwide, it makes sense to use Google Analytics to understand customer behaviour. You can get intelligence like an overview of your audience, the demographics, their geographical mapping. You can also get details about customer acquisition. For example, how have you got these customers? Are they the paid channels and organic channels? Or social media? Have they been referred to your website directly via a link?

Woopra

Though many people have not heard about it, Woopra is a powerful tool, especially for real-time information on your customers. You can get insights like live visitor statistics, their location and live intelligence on the pages they have visited. The ability to do a live chat with them one on one is worthy of mention.

Mouse Flow

As the name suggests, mouse flow primarily gives you insights and information on the different keystrokes and heat maps used by your visitors on various pages of your website. There are five distinct features of Mouse Flow. The first one is heat maps and, the second one is session replay. Just as a store camera records the customer behavior in the store, you can replay how users have flown from various pages and interacted on your website.

Another crucial feature of Mouse flow is conversion funnels. What it simply does is allows you to see the customer journey from page to page. If you have heard about treemaps on a website, you will understand the concept better. You can use the information from this feature and conduct an a/b test to improve the customer journey.

Talking about web analytics tools, we cannot miss Adobe Analytics. Adobe Analytics is a state-of-art award-winning tool. It helps you to gather data and present it in a way that can help you understand conversion better. However, the trick is it is not free. Hence it is advisable to buy the service if you have a thriving big business.

Glossary of Terms

Hit

You must have heard about hits very often when it comes to analytics. How many times do you have a page view in a day? How many times are visitors on your website at a given time? For the sake of analytics, we will define hit as a page view.

Page View

A page view is nothing but an impression of a piece of consolidated information on your website. For example, a web page consists of images, files, graphics, among other things.

Event

An event is a trigger that takes place on your website. For example, you could track the number of clicks on a particular form. You can also track how many people clicked on your webinar link. Make sure that you set up events and define them before you analyze them in analytics.

Session

A session or a visit to a webpage is nothing but one trip made by a particular user to one of the web pages of your website. Now, you could ask, what if a person clicks on a webpage and then stays on that webpage for five hours? How do you calculate such a session? As a standard, most sessions last only for 30 minutes and, the counter resets for analytics.

Unique Visitor

You can identify a unique visitor with a unique ID, for example, an IP address. Unique visitors differ from page views because unique visitors can be individuals without duplication. However, the same visitor can have multiple page views of the website.

New/Repeat Visitor

A new visitor is someone who visits your website for the first time. Returning visitors are an audience who has already been to your website previously. Aim to have more return visitors as it says that your website has valuable content. It also increases your chances of generating more sales.

Impression

An impression is nothing but the rendering of your web page that the potential customers or website visitors happened to see during their time on the internet.

Benefits of Web Analytics

By now, it should be clear as to what are the benefits of analytics. First things first, it helps you to analyze the traffic to your website. It helps understand the customer behaviour so that you can modify and make necessary changes for better results. Eventually, you also want to find out the right customer for your products and services. Lastly, you want to track your overall actual performance compare to the business goals.

Is Web Analytics a Good Career Option?

Yes, web analytics is a very lucrative field that you should consider. Just imagine there are so many websites out there today and, digital marketing overall is booming like never before. With newer businesses rising every day, there is a need for quality and qualified web analytics professionals who can help companies grow.

To get into web analytics, I suggest that you get a qualification in Google Analytics to start with and then go for advanced certification courses from reputed institutions. It will help you to bolster your position as a web analytics expert in the long run. You can either join an organization full-time or work as a freelancer and help small and medium scale businesses.