Are you wondering what is 'Web Analytics'? and why is it important for your website?
In this article, we will explain define web analytics, discuss a tool most commonly used by businesses and why you should use it too.
What is Web Analytics?
Website Analytics, or Web Analytics, refers to the collection, processing, measurement, and reporting of data generated on the web.
Simple enough! No, not really. The next question here is what actually is this 'data' and how is it generated? Simply put, all users of the website (human or non-human) generate data by the activities they perform online. Measuring this online data is one of the jobs performed by a web analytics tool. Processing it into usable information and reporting is another.
Web analytics provides you usable information about the users that visit your web property.
Why is Web Analytics important?
It helps you measure how well your website is performing. It helps you set goals and work towards them. A web analytics tool can collect all sorts of interesting information about the users (visitors to your website) that can help us work towards our business goals.
Let us consider this example: You have a website at yourname.com How will you decide if it is popular or not? To get this information, you have to see the number of visitors on your website. If the number of visitors to your website increase over a period of time, you can safely assume that your website is doing what it is supposed to. How do you get this information? This is where a web analytics tool like Google Analytics can help.
Let us use two graphs from the GA demo account of the Google Merchandise store given by Google for the purpose to illustrate this.
The first graph shows the number of users the store has from September 1, 2020 - September 15, 2020.
Users: 20,460
The second graph shows the number of users the store has from September 16, 2020 - September 30, 2020.
Users: 22,228
Image source: Google
Which web analytics platform should I use for my website?
According to a survey by W3Techs, as of the year 2020, more than half of the websites online used Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free to use for small businesses. It gives you lots of insights and helpful information about the traffic to your website.
For more information about Google Analytics, you can read my blog post.
Why should I use a web analytics tool for my website?
A web analytics tool can give you actionable insights about your web traffic, which can help you make better business decisions, implement business strategy and help your business grow.
Most analytics tools collect anonymous traffic data. That means when a user visits a website, a randomly generated user identification id is associated with the user.
We will list 4 reasons why a web analytics tool is important to your business' growth
1. Get to know your visitors
Knowing more about the traffic we get on the website, helps us to cater to them. A web analytics tool like Google Analytics gives us demographic data about the visitors that come to our website. The web Analytics tool collects information like:
- Age: This parameter tells us about the age range of the visitors to the website.
- Gender: This information tells us about the gender of our website and might be interesting to bloggers, retailers etc.
2. It can help you optimize your best content
Knowing about the visitors to your website, can help you cater your content to them. For example, a fashion blogger who has mostly millennial female readers will benefit by generating more content ie. writing more blog posts of interest to millennial females. That can help increase traffic and establish brand identity in that niche.
3. It can help with the SEO
Increased traffic results into better search engine rankings. Tools like Google Analytics can be synced with the Google Search Console to give keyword suggestions.
4. Must have for ecommerce businesses
A web analytics tool is very important for anyone engaging in ecommerce.
The above picture is from my Google Analytics dashboard
Conversion tracking is also called tracking of visitors' engagement with your website. Retailers use this information to improve their marketing efforts.
Consider the goal of an online hotel booking website. The goal of the website is to increase the number of visitors to their website make an online booking using their booking calendar. For this, they need to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for their online visitors to engage with the content of the website and make a booking on the calendar. This information is tracked by a web analytics tool. The data collected on their web analytics tool gives them information about visitor engagement with the content of their website.
To summarize this article, we discussed what are web analytics tools, why should we use them and how can they benefit your business.