Web analytics 101- What you need to know about web analytics and why it matters.
The key to success for any online business is to understand the behaviour of its target audience. Understanding who visits your website and how they interact can play a crucial role in taking your business to the next level- and this is where web analytics comes in.
Starting an online business is easy but making it a success requires constant efforts and you can only do so by mastering web analytics.
Web Analytics explained:
Web analytics is the data that measures different activities of your websites’ visitors and all of that information can be accessed through the “stats” feature. Simply click on the “Insights” page of your WordPress website and you will be presented with a variety of useful stats.
Below is a list of some useful WordPress stats that can help your business:
Posts related stats:
- Latest post summary: Here, you will find out the details of how your latest post is performing including the total number of views, comments, and likes.
- Posting activity: When and how often you post- this stat provides useful insights into that.
- All-time posts, visitors, and views: This is a detailed analysis of all your posts. Here you can find some useful stats such as the number of your all-time posts, the total number of views and visitors, and the best-performing posts with regards to the number of views.
- Most popular day and hour: Use this to find out which days and hours are working best for your business.
General stats:
- Views by country: Find out the demographics of your visitors using this feature.
- Referrers: Dissect your audience even further and find out what sites are sending traffic to your website.
- Today’s stats: All the stats-number of visitors, page views, comments, likes, and shares- for a particularly selected day.
- Search engine terms: This is probably one of the most important stats and explains what queries your web users are using in the search engines to find your website.
Why Web Analytics matter?
Your business depends on your website visitors and as such, learning about their behaviour is crucial.
Here are a few reasons why web analytics matter:
1- Evaluate your current content
Just by analyzing the behaviour of your web-visitors you can measure and evaluate the success of your current marketing strategy. Finding out the most popular posts, the optimal times for posting content, where your traffic is coming from can actually lay grounds for future success.
2- Optimise your content to gain more traffic
Knowing what’s attracting the most visitors, you can fine-tune your existing content strategy and focus on content that is bringing you the most traffic. You can also leverage SEO for that matter too.
For example, if you are a SaaS solution provider and get the most traffic on how-to articles, you might want to focus on adding more of that sort of content. After all, the sales will come if you actually solve the problems of others.
3- Device a winning social media marketing strategy
Mastering web analytics is also a great way to device a winning social media marketing strategy.
For example, if your business is focusing more on Facebook but web analytics is showing that you get the most traffic from Tumblr, then you might want to change your existing social media marketing strategy and focus more on Tumblr.
Taking Web analytics to a whole new level:
While the basic WordPress “Stat” feature does offer some great insights into website visitors, if you want an even detailed analysis of your audience then you must consider installing Google Analytics.
Starting up with Google Analytics is pretty straightforward and all you need to do is just install the plugin and follow the instructions to integrate the tracking ID to your website.
Once the setup is done, Google Analytics provides real-time marketing analytics of your website and provides a long list of useful stats that you can look into. For example, with google analytics, you can monitor the bounce rate of your website and analyse how you can improve the average time spent by a visitor. You can also learn about the devices your audience is using and then optimise your website even more for that particular device.
Whether you run a start-up looking to make a name for itself or an already established business looking to expand, the importance of understanding web analytics cannot be overlooked. Mastering web analytics and producing content that resonates with your readers, you can turn your website visitors into loyal customers and can take your business to a whole new level.
Alternatively, if technical knowledge is not your thing, you can always take the help of an expert like Net Branding, to analyse your web analytics and devise a winning content strategy for you.
