So you run a business. You hired a top website design company to build your information site or eCommerce store, maintain your blog and/or periodically get active on your social media pages. Everything about your online strategy is good except you find it difficult to attract new customers through it. What are you doing wrong?
It is not that your audience don’t know about you, but there are chances that you are not keeping them motivated enough to know you more. Why? Because you don’t monitor data about them on your website, overlook their behaviour on your social media pages and are not aware about the factors that may appeal to them. In other words, you are loosing a big change of getting new business because you are failing to improve your website’s performance and conversion rates.
What is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is the internet data that is collected to analyse and report the web usage. It provides means to assess the effectiveness of your website. Web analytics is a useful tool for business and market research and is majorly done in two ways: on-site and off-site. On-site web analytics measures the user’s behaviour once they are on your website and covers drivers and conversions. The off-site web analytics is the collection, measurement and analysis of data regardless of whether it is your website or not. It includes the setting of various parameters that help to understand the website’s potential audience, visibility, competitive intelligence and impact on what is happening on it/through it.
Why you should use web analytics?
To know who is visiting your website. Conventional website feedback tools only tell how many visitors are coming to your website and where (the geographical location) are they from. They don’t tell what interests these people, how they rate your products/services and the possible reasons why they don’t stay on your website. Our web analytics not only highlight these details, but also make it easy to find intuitive ways to improve the site’s overall experience and effectiveness while monitoring simple trends.
To evaluate the quality of your web content. Web analytics studies online behaviour of your visitors and improves it. By becoming aware of factors such as how people use your website or which keywords lead them to your pages, you can rewrite your landing/inner pages in a way that they are motivated to navigate more.
To gain an edge over comparative analysis. Web analytics gives you the flexibility to compare the data and find out where your strengths/weaknesses lie. For example, only knowing that you have received 10,000 more hits for a particular product isn’t of much use without knowing that those 10,000 page views are 30 percent higher than the previous 6 months average. That’s the comparative analysis with sensible data use, which makes the entire process successful.
So, how do you start?
This post kicks off a debate on how web analytics, when matched with website design can help your business just in time. In our subsequent posts, we’d be discussing how we can smartly use web analytics, governance and measurement to gain a competitive edge in the market. If there are any related topics you’d like to see covered as part of this three post series, please let us know. We’ll be happy to hear from you.