Every website owner uses some sort of analytics tool to track traffic to their website. Just tracking your website’s traffic, however, won’t give you the real story of how people are interacting with your website. You need to know what analytics to look out for, where on your website these analytics are relevant, and how you can improve your website to reach more people based on those analytics. Most of the tips detailed below come from google analytics, but they can be applied to other analytics tools as well.
In 2014, cellphones contributed 60% of all internet traffic. More than half of internet viewers look at web pages through a phone screen and not at a desktop. This means that, like it or not, your website must be mobile friendly. If not, you are missing out on potential customers. Concerning mobile versus computer traffic, the most important analytics to watch for are the difference between conversion rates and bounce rates across mobile and computer platforms. If your conversion rates for your website are greater than your mobile-site, perhaps you should look into improving your site for mobile use. Moreover, if few people bounce from your mobile-site but a great deal bounce from your website, you may need to improve your website to increase viewer retention.
With analytics, the data valuable to improving your website is the data you don’t have. If you don’t have many incoming viewers from popular social media platforms, that tells you your website needs to get onto social media, whether that be in the form of ads, or posts by a facebook or twitter page. If mostly everyone reaches your page through another website’s referral, and not through search engines, than you need to ask yourself why you haven’t spent any time focusing on your page’s search index. If the opposite is true, you should ask why no one links to your website on theirs, which may lie in your content. Getting a sense of where your website’s traffic comes from can be a great way to make changes to improve your site’s overall amount of traffic. Moreover, this type of info can be great to track how your marketing channels are doing at bringing traffic to your site, by tracking how much traffic is due to clicks on your marketing campaign. This can help you determine which campaigns work, and which do not.
Demographics are important to anyone marketing something. Demographics let the marketer know who their target audience is. The same is true for demographic analytics for a website. Google analytic’s audience report offers a demographics and interest section that details viewers age, gender, and site interests, based on what they tend to look at in general on the web. This information is invaluable to a web developer from a marketing standpoint. This shows you if your target audience is the same as those actually viewing your website. If not, this tells you you’re marketing toward that audience hasn’t hit the mark. Once you figure that out, you can change or improve the criteria you target your audience with in your advertisements, campaigns, and site display.
Your website should hold viewers’ attention for enough time that they convert, or perform the action you desire, like buying something or signing up for a newsletter. Viewers cannot complete a conversion without being on your webpage, so tracking where on your site people click out of the most is integral to keeping them on the page, and eventually making a conversion. Data on bounce rates can determine if there is a problem with your site’s content, layout, or call to action. People will bounce from your site: it’s what happens and you shouldn’t be discouraged that eyes aren’t on your page at all times. The bounce rate can help you determine problems with your website, specifically problem areas like certain pages or page elements. Tracking this data can be very beneficial to reducing bounce rates, and keeping people on your site for longer.
Web analytics can be invaluable to your website’s conversion rates, and now you know what to look for and what it means for your website. These tips can really help determine problems your website may contain, which is a win win for both you and your website visitors.
