What Website Analytics Can Tell You About Your Business

What if there was a way you could see how many unique visitors you had to your website last month? Or what if you could see how much time they were spending there and which pages were their favourite? Have you ever wished you knew more about your visitors, such as where they come from or what their interests are?

All of these questions (and more!) can be answered with the help of website analytics data. In this article, we’ll show you some of the exciting information you can discover with website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to help you discover more about your website performance.

Audience Data - About Your Website Visitors

Using website analytics tools, you’re able to view data within a specific time frame and get an overview of data on your website visitors.

Having an overview like this gives you basic metrics regarding the overall performance of your website. You’ll be able to see how many users visited your website on a given day and how many sessions there were. Sessions refer to the number of times a visitor is actively engaged with your website. You’ll also be able to see the average session duration for that time period. A high average is a great indication that your website content is useful.

Demographics & Location

Information on age and gender along with people's physical location helps you to form a stronger picture of the type of people visiting your website and allows you to understand the sort of people interested in what you’re offering.

Location data is useful to ensure you’re attracting the right audience. If your business only operates in the UK and you’re receiving the majority of your sessions from abroad, there’s either an opportunity there or something is not quite right.

Interests

Some web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are able to use cookies to determine the interests of a user based on their app or web browser activity. This valuable insight can show you what other categories people have an affinity with as well as their product purchase interest.

It’s important to note that Google can’t access the interests of every single user. For example, some users may have cookies disabled or be browsing incognito. Nonetheless, it is a great indicator of what your website visitors are interested in.

You can use the data to make decisions about the content and design of your website. If you feel you’re not attracting visitors with the right interests, you may want to make changes. Likewise, if you discover a number of visitors who share an interest you’d never thought of before, you could even work on tailoring some content to these people.

Thanks to the power of Google Analytics we can see in our own data that a significant number of visitors have just started a new business. We may want to tailor some of our website, blog or social media content towards these new startup businesses. Without the data though, we wouldn’t have necessarily known this.

Acquisition Data - How People Find You

Moving on from your audience, you may also want to know how that audience discovered you. Did they come from a Google Search or was it from one of your digital ads, perhaps?

By looking at acquisition data in more detail, you’re able to see which channels bring in the most valuable traffic to your website. You can even drill down on which social channels are bringing you the most visits or which website domains give you the most referrals.

By looking at acquisition data in more detail, you’re able to see which channels bring in the most valuable traffic to your website. You can even drill down on which social channels are bringing you the most visits or which website domains give you the most referrals.

Here’s an example of why more detailed information is important and can really turn your vanity metrics on their head:

Let’s say you created a Facebook post with a link to your website. Perhaps your Facebook Insights data tells you your post received 1,000 link clicks. When we look at analytics data we can also see those 1,000 website visits via Facebook. At a first glance, this looks great!

However, when you break it down, let’s say the average session duration is only 5 seconds. This means that the majority of your clicks from Facebook resulted in an immediate bounce. Therefore, these 1,000 link clicks have provided next to no value.

This is why website analytics tools are such a valuable tool that helps marketers gain a much bigger picture.

Website Behaviour Data - How People Use Your Website

So far we’ve covered how analytics data gives us information about our audience and how they’ve found their way to the website. Google Analytics also gives us data on what people do once they are there.

Site Content

Within the web analytics, you can get more granular with your website data and discover:

• Most popular/least popular pages
• Time spent on page
• Bounce rate per page
• Percentage of users that left the website from that page
• Landing pages
• Exit pages

By understanding the most popular and least popular pages, along with the average time spent on a page, you can begin to get a picture of the typical user journey through your website.

Landing pages are a great indication of what is attracting people to your site. If you notice a blog post is one of the most popular landing pages, then this page is doing a great job of attracting visitors and you should aim to capitalise on it.

Exit pages, of course, tell you which pages people are leaving from. You can use this to try and improve the content on your page.

Events

With advanced Google Analytics know-how, you can set up click tracking which will help you to monitor important events on your website. For example, at PS, we’re able to install tracking software that can track people who have expressed interest in a services page, an important piece of content or even clicked on a video. In the analytics interface, you’re able to see how many people performed these actions that you value if you have them set up.

Conversions - valuable actions on your website

Conversion tracking is another form of tracking on your website but this is for actions that have a certain value. These conversion goals directly affect the success of your business Think e-commerce purchases, newsletter sign-ups or lead contact forms. These are conversions that can affect your overall revenue.

E-commerce

If you have an ecommerce website, you can use tools such as Google Analytics to see an overview of your ecommerce revenue, average order value, number of purchases and which products we purchased the most. You can also use this ecommerce data as a breakdown metric for other areas of analytics. For example, if you wanted to see what age group brings in the most revenue, you can do this.

Multi-channel conversions

It’s likely that your website conversions don’t just come from one place. You may be benefitting from PPC ads, referrals or social media traffic alongside organic traffic. With conversion tracking set up, you’ll be able to access data for these multi-channel conversions, see which ones are performing well and even where there’s some overlap.

Using data for your business

Website analytics tools provide a wealth of data about your online presence and allow you to evaluate your performance and adjust accordingly. Perhaps you discover that the majority of your website purchases come from a surprising demographic or that visitors share a common interest that you can leverage in your marketing campaigns.

Have you got Google Analytics set up properly on your website? If only there was someone who could help…

Get in touch with the PS team today for help setting up or understanding your website analytics.