Website Data Analytics
Knowledge is Power
Imagine if a merchant decided which items to reorder for his retail store just by picking his favorite product names rather than those that sold the best? The store would soon run out of its top items and probably be overloaded with merchandise that doesn’t sell. What a terrible way to make a business decision!
To successfully run a business, you must be armed with the accurate, timely information you need to draw conclusions and make informed decisions. In the 21st century, a key part of the data you need to run your business has to do with to your website and its performance.
Surprisingly, many company leaders do not review their website’s performance data, and some do not even have access to it! In fact, we sometimes discover that a new client’s website does not have any type of performance tracking system installed at all when we first start working on it. You can’t have a successful website without access to this critical data!
Is your website doing its job? What key metrics from your website analytics system do you evaluate regularly? Can actionable web page analytics findings help your business grow?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, let the team at Globe Runner help. Our SEO and website analytics experts can perform a thorough analysis of your site and help identify the key performance indicators you should use to make decisions for your website and your business.
Google Analytics Services
Many of our clients use Google Analytics (GA) software to track their website’s performance. According to the website Builtwith.com, more than 28 million websites use Google Analytics. World Wide Web Technology Surveys states they know which traffic analysis tool is used by 56% of all the worlds websites and “Google Analytics is used by 85.8% of all the websites whose traffic analysis tool we know.”
GA provides robust tracking of dozens of important metrics that we use daily to help improve our clients’ websites and grow their businesses. Through the use of this helpful tool, we can gather data on a website’s audience, how users arrive there, what they do on the website, what type of device they are using, and much more. We can even see how many users are there right now, in real time!
We recommend installing GA and most other bits of external measurement code on most websites via Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM is a free solution that allows tracking tags to be added and managed on a website through a user-friendly interface without altering the site’s code. GTM offers premade templates for easy installation as well as preview and debug features. Globe Runner’s SEO team is adept at the use and management of both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and can answer any questions you may have on these valuable site analytics tools.
What Can We Learn from Website Analytics Management?
We need site analytics to learn about a website’s users, its strengths, and its weaknesses. How do users find the website? Where were they immediately prior to their visit? What pages do they find useful? What pages did they think would be useful, but were not? What are they looking for but cannot find? Do users frequently exit after a visit to a particular page? Web page analytics can give us insights into all of these questions and much, much more.
Here are some common performance metrics and site dimensions that the analytics management professionals at Globe Runner use to evaluate a website’s performance:
- # of users/# of new users
- # of sessions
- # of pages/session
- # of page views
- Average session duration
- Bounce rate
- Goal completion rate
- Average time on page
- Conversion rate
- Device type
- Language
- Referring website
- Traffic channel
- Location
- Traffic flow path
- Location
- Landing Pages
- Exit Pages
- Site Search Terms
- Events
- Goals
- Multi-Channel Funnels
These metrics and dimensions can tell us so much about a website, how consumers use it, what is working, and what is not working. Traffic channel reveals whether the visitor found the website via organic search, a pay-per-click ad, social media, or another traffic source. Referrer shows which website the visitor was on immediately before clicking a link to your website.
Bounce rate tells us the percentage of users leaving a website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate likely means users don’t like what they see, or they expected something different. Low time on page indicates a similar concern.
There’s a lot to unpack in all of this data, to be sure, but the SEO and data analytics team at Globe Runner is here to handle all of this for you. We do all the detail work for you and boil it down to just the essential information you need in any easy-to-use dashboard, which we will review with you each and every month. No need to worry about analysis paralysis when you’ve got our site analytics experts in your corner.
Other Website Analytics Management Tools & Services
In addition to the analytics management solutions discussed above, there are other tools we can use to help analyze your site’s performance. What are some of the other ways we can use data analytics to improve websites for our clients?
Behavior Analytics
Behavior analytics are tools that allow us to see exactly what a site user does on a website. For example, heat map technology is a colorful depiction of where users go on a particular web page. The heat map visually represents where a user stops their mouse, if they click on the page, if they stop to look at something, and if there is a part of the page that they do not ever look at. This helps us determine where information on the page should be in order for it to receive the attention it merits.
Session recordings capture exactly what the user does as they navigate through your website. The recording allows us to watch users interacts with (and potentially struggle with) various elements of the site, especially those that do not work as expected. Session recordings can be very helpful in determining why users are leaving a website prematurely. These tools are particularly useful for conversion rate optimization.
A/B Testing Tools
Web page analytics can be used to make decisions about advertising messaging, and about site design and content, as well. We commonly will conduct A/B tests on paid search ads, and on various elements of a landing page to determine which versions will be most impactful with consumers.
We use analytics tools to construct and conduct random testing, and then track the results for us until they are statistically valid. Once a test is complete, we can move on to another test. The process repeats again and again for as long as needed.
Google Search Console
Another tool from Google, Search Console is a very useful tool in an SEO’s kit for improving search engine performance. When Search Console is connected to Google Analytics, additional reporting metrics are available on GA reports including impressions, clicks, click-through-rate, and average position (on search results pages).
Real Insight on your Website
You can see how essential data analytics is to get a handle on your website’s performance. Now you just have to find the time to review all the data and determine what to do with it, without risking information overload. It’s probably best to leave that to the pros at Globe Runner. We will do the work for you and give you the salient data you need in one handy, digestible monthly report.