A website only has value if there are people visiting it. Whether you have a blog where you publish your writings, or an official website to promote your brand and services, it won’t give you much benefit if nobody wants to explore it. Without visitors, a website is just like a book on a shelf that nobody ever picks up to read. That’s why you need to understand the importance of keeping track of your website’s statistics.
The first and foremost thing you need to do to enhance your site’s visibility is to look into its statistics and analytics. Learning about and knowing your website analytics has numerous benefits for you and your business, some of which are discussed in this article below.
But before talking about the benefits, let’s describe website analytics.
What are Website Analytics?
The term ‘website analytics’ refers to the process of compiling, processing, analyzing, and presenting the internal and external data about a website. The purpose of website analytics is to:
- Show the site owner how effective their marketing efforts have been.
- Find hitches in their strategies and online services to improve them.
- Create visitor and customer profiles to give them a better understanding of their target audience.
- Provide insights so they can come up with better solutions that would lead to increased sales.
Image taken from Strikingly
The success of every business is based on its understanding of how effective its strategies are. If you run most of your business operations through your site, then the best way to check this effectiveness is to utilize the data in your business’s website analytics.
If you want to know whether or not you have a successful business website, you can also gather data directly from your customers, competitors, general public, trade partners, and prospects. But in website analytics, you will get the data in the most unbiased, organized, and comprehensive form, especially if you use good web analytics tools.
Now let’s talk about what you can do with or how you can benefit from your website analytics.
Things You Can Do With Website Analytics
1. Measure Your Site’s Traffic
The key objective of website analytics is to tell you how many visitors are visiting your site everyday, every week, and every month. Not only that, website analytics tools will reveal to you the following.
- How many users are currently on your site?
- Where are they viewing your site from?
- What are they doing or which web page are they visiting on your site?
- How much time has it been for them on that particular web page?
Image taken from Strikingly
In other words, web analytics tools will reveal to you the sources of your site’s traffic, their demographics, and their activity on your site in detail.
2. Track Your Site’s Bounce Rate
The bounce rate of a website refers to the percentage of people who visit the site but leave without any activity or interaction. Web analytics tools reveal the bounce rate of your site. If your site’s bounce rate is high, it could mean one or both of the following.
- Users didn’t find your site’s content relevant to what they were looking for.
- Visitors did not have a good overall experience on the site.
A high bounce rate greatly reduces the site’s value. If the visitors don’t interact with your site, you won’t be able to generate any leads, make any sales, or have any kind of conversions on your site, which is very bad for your business.
If you want to increase your profitability, it is crucial that you keep an eye on the bounce rate in your website analytics, and try to keep it low at all times.
Best web analytics are those that not only reveal your site’s bounce rate, but also tell you which web pages are particularly causing your visitors to exit the site. This information lets you know which sections of your site you particularly need to improve in order to reduce your site’s bounce rate.
3. Optimize Your Marketing Campaigns
Website analytics tools reveal comprehensive statistics about your marketing campaigns. All you need to do is create and insert specific links on your web pages, which enable the web analytics tools to track your visitors’ activity in relation to your campaign.
When you use the best web analytics to track your promotion campaigns, you’ll be able to compare the effectiveness of one campaign with another, which in turn will enable you to create a marketing plan that really works.
4. Identify The Right Target Audience
When you are able to view and analyze who’s visiting your site most often, you can better streamline your outreach campaigns to cater to the needs of those people. Website analytics will reveal to you the demographics of your most loyal visitors, as well as their activity on your site. From this information, you may be able to figure out exactly what your visitors are looking for, so that you can optimize your site’s content and layout based on their needs. This in turn will help in website speed optimization.
It is important for a business to know what kind of crowd it attracts the most, so that they can offer solutions to that specific crowd. Website analytics go a long way in helping a business identify it’s right target audience.
5. Improve Your Web Service
Web analytics tools also reveal any potential problems or technical issues occurring on a site. For example, if you have spent a great amount of time creating a sales funnel, but it’s not generating enough sales, your website analytics will show you exactly where your prospects are dropping out.
If you have a landing page that’s not giving you enough leads, your website analytics might reveal to you that visitors are not spending enough time on the page, which could mean that the content on the page is not appealing enough. If you find out through your website analytics that many users are dropping out on your checkout page, that would mean your product may be sellable, but there’s something wrong in its price, your terms and conditions, or the payment integration on your site.
So now that you know the benefits of using website analytics, let’s look into some of the best web analytics tools.
5 Good Website Analytics Tools
1. Google Analytics
For most users, Google Analytics offers the best web analytics. Google Analytics provides a lot of information, such as live site traffic data, useful insights about the audience, and available integrations with other useful Google products (for example AdSense and Adwords). All information is presented in a fairly straightforward and easy-to-understand format. It is even easy to add your website to Google Analytics.
A great advantage Google has is that, being the monopoly search engine that it is, it offers many premium-styled features to all its users for free. The standard version of Google Analytics suffices for newcomers who are looking to just access the basic web analytics tools.
2. Open Web Analytics
This one offers many features that are similar to other website analytics tools. It also gives a few supplementary features. With Open Web Analytics, you can track your site’s live traffic, referrals, and other such metrics. One unique feature of the OWA is its page heatmaps, which allow you to trace where your visitors clicked on a web page. This is helpful in assessing your call-to-action button placements, and readjusting the buttons accordingly if they’re not effective in their existing place. In other words, it helps you to follow the call-to-action button best practices.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is suitable for those who need to extract data from multiple sources, not only from your own site. This tool enables you to pull data from anywhere on the internet and compile it all in one place. It is usually used by those who are more advanced in their technical skills. It is visually very appealing as well.
4. SEMRush
SEMRush is among website analytics tools that’s actually more popular for its SEM and SEO tips or capabilities. Its web analytics tools provide traffic analytics and other important metrics that help you see where your site stands in comparison with your competitors. In fact, its unique selling point is that it helps you measure your competition by identifying your competitors’ web traffic sources.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
The pro version of SEMRush has more robust website analytics features that provide you with a content marketing platform, historical data, branded reports, and a large keywords metrics that update every month.
5. Strikingly
Image taken from Strikingly
If you build a website in Strikingly, you will have access to our awesome analytics feature from your site’s dashboard. Using your Strikingly built-in analytics is very easy. The statistics show you the number of your site’s visitors, which country they are viewing from, and where they are coming from to your site (e.g. from social media platforms, from other websites, or from any other landing page of yours).
If you build an online store in Strikingly, you’ll be able to view analytics from more data points, including impressions, clicks, conversions and sales for each product page. This information will help you keep your inventory updated with the changing trends. It will also show you which part of your sales funnel is producing the greatest results. To make your data more comprehensive, you can also add your Strikingly website to Google Analytics and benefit from both, the Strikingly analytics as well as its Google Analytics.
Build a website with Strikingly today, use its analytics to design effective marketing campaigns, and set your business up for success!
