Web analytics is the process of working with website data to improve user experience (UX) and site performance. It includes creating goals, collecting and analyzing data, and making decisions based on your analysis.
Digital analysts, e-commerce specialists, UX designers, product managers, and content managers all rely on web analytics to get their jobs done.
The most widely used web analytics tool is Google Analytics . Here is a snapshot of what the platform can show you:
But there are other products (which we’ll discuss later in the article) that can produce similar results. These types of analytics tools help marketers and analysts in several important ways.
Advantages of Web Analytics
Web analytics helps you understand phone number lead your website and your online visitors so you can continually improve performance.
Below are some of the specific ways you can benefit from using web analytics.
Understand your audience
Web analytics tells you how visitors to your website interact with it. And it can help answer important questions like:
- Which pages do visitors view most?
- Which pages hold attention?
- Which pages are losing visitors?
- How many first-time visitors are returning versus repeat visitors?
- How do visitors interact with your site’s content?
This is Google Analytics data showing the most viewed pages in the Google Products Store demo account. You can see the page views, the number of unique visitors who viewed those pages, and the average time they were actively engaged with the page.
As you get to know your audience better through data like this, you’ll be able to craft better content and a better website experience.
Determine your main conversion actions
Google says a conversion is any “user users who received and previewed your email how action that you count because you think it’s important.” And how important it is depends on the purpose of the website.
For example, an online purchase is probably the most important conversion for an e-commerce website. But a form submission may be the most important conversion for a B2B company looking to capture leads.
Whatever the conversion, you can record data about it and measure how effective your site is at driving that specific action. Then, you can work to improve those conversion rates.
Here you can see the conversions for the Google Merchandise Store demo account. The 1,496 purchase conversions are certainly the most important. But the view_item conversion (102,361 occurrences) and add_to_cart (25,626 occurrences) are also important.
If you compare those second two numbers, you’ll see that 25% of all item views result in adding the item to cart. That 25% can be used as a baseline, and the team can see if they can improve results from there.
The team could try to improve by adding customer reviews and video demonstrations on product pages. Small improvements in conversion efficiency can have a big impact on overall performance.
Manage your advertising budget
Web analytics can tell you how many visits and conversions you get from various traffic sources. These include paid search ads, paid social ads, email marketing, and organic search.
Here you can see the budget and conversion data from the Google Ads platform for a company that generates new customers through completed contact forms.
This search campaign generated 92 conversions at an advertising cost of $1,877.75 during the time period in question. Combining those two metrics gives a cost per conversion of $20.41.
The current budget is $30.50 per day, and can be adjusted as needed.
This type of web analytics data helps you european union phone number make smarter decisions about your advertising budget.
You can choose to change your budget between multiple Google Ads campaigns. Or even to change your budget between Google Ads and Meta Ads if you see different results in terms of conversion effectiveness.