Semalt: What Is Web Analytics And How Do You Perform Them On Your Site?



In order for a business to meet the needs of its customers, it needs to know their trends and behaviors. Surveys or focus groups help to gain valuable information from consumers. However, they fail to detail in depth what you need to know as a business to increase sales, retain customers or drive more traffic to your site.

How do you know how many visitors your website has today? Has this visitor been to the site more than once before? Why did they leave? What keeps them coming back? Web analytics is the key to answering these questions. In addition, the SEO Personal Dashboard tool is the all-in-one tool you need to have throughout the process.

In fact, at least 70% of consumers research a business online before making a purchase. That's where the power of the DSD tool lies to help your site! Learn more about web analytics and how to leverage the data it provides to delight your visitors here. 

What is web analytics?



Web analytics is the process of collecting and examining all the data on a website to ensure its effectiveness. It is a set of key analytics to improve the reach of site objectives such as visitor retention and conversion.

 If you perform web analytics, you will be able to observe and analyze user behavior and study their browsing habits. This information will also help you in the gestation or development of a product or service.

Over time, web analytics has been refined into a comprehensive process that streamlines strategic data for monitoring and review.

What is web analytics used for?

As its definition suggests, web analytics collects information, reports and analyzes data from a website. This allows you to see how your company's site is performing and do something valuable with the information obtained. Its main functions include:
In short, analytics is about knowing what needs to be changed on a website, how to do it, and whether the changes work. Even a small change can profoundly change the visitor's experience. It will impact their permanence and the number of times they reach the purchase.

The 4 Components of Web Analytics

Web analytics measurement can be divided into 4 important components:

Capture: when opening an online business, the first thing you need to measure is the capture of the different traffic channels you use. One of them can be LinkedIn or other social networks, for example.

Activation: Once you've determined the channels and traffic metrics, measure visitor behavior against the goals. This component focuses on the usability of the site. In other words, once you've successfully captured traffic, it's time to measure how each user acts.

Conversion: when you already know how your visitors act, it's time to make your site achieve your goals as a business. This could be the culmination of a purchase, visitors signing up for a newsletter, downloading content created by you, among other goals.

Retention: if you've already succeeded in getting the customer to do what you wanted, the path doesn't end there. The last part focuses on following up with customers to keep them coming back. Web analytics will measure if the efforts are effective or if you need to change your strategy. 

How to do a website analysis in 8 phases?

Here are 8 essential phases to make a web analysis:

1. Define the business objectives and KPIs of your site


KPIs are the key performance indicators that measure how well or how poorly your project is performing and are used to see how close you are to your business goals.  

Once you've determined your company's site goals, such as increasing sales or traffic, improving the user experience, or providing more valuable information about your industry, it's time to develop KPIs. Our recommendation is to make them via the SMART method so that they are measurable, achievable, relevant and with a defined time frame.

2. Determine the timing of data collection

Depending on the level and objective of your project, determine the time you will spend collecting the data you need. With this, it is possible to establish metrics and know if the website optimization is really working or if you need to implement new ideas and strategies to improve it. 

You can use a specific tool such as DSD to make sure you have the right information.

3. Choose a web analytics tool

To better understand your visitors, you need to treat them first and foremost as an individual person and not just as a group of people. Each one gives you important data to improve your strategies; all this must be collected, measured, analyzed and processed. A web analytics tool takes you through each of these aspects in a logical and orderly fashion.

Fortunately, there are many types of tools available today that can help you turn the information you collect into an easy-to-understand report, giving you a broader view of your visitors' behavior. Here we share with you the best all-in-one tool, the SEO Personal Dashboard. This tool can effectively help you in this process.

4. Analyze the whole website

It is important to look at your entire website in great detail. We recommend that you make a checklist. Checklists are a good idea before you start a project because they allow you to look at what you will need in detail. For web analytics, it's no different. Get together with your work team and determine what items are missing.

5. Set up a measurement process

The goal of web analytics is to collect and analyze behavioral data from users who visit your site. And good analytics requires measurement models that detect all important consumption patterns. The two most useful models are logs or beacons.

In simple terms, the tag is an element included in each web page that is going to be measured, that is, a code that is inserted into the source code of the page. A tagging plan allows categorizing visits and users of the site. The data it collects is very valuable, especially for sales-oriented marketing strategies. In addition, it is a very effective element if you are looking to retain customers, visitors or readers.

With a tag, it is possible to determine how long a user stays, as well as when they leave. Thanks to this, the causes of the bounce rate can be detected, either due to irrelevant content or technical deficiencies. The tag will help you a lot to detect all the defects in time and improve the experience of your visitors.

6. Group your web content

Grouping your web content allows you to analyze blocks without having to filter the different types of URLs. For example, if you have an online store, you can group pages by category, products or sub-categories, in order to analyze user behavior on these types of pages.

7. Measure and report

Get an interpretation of the data where you will find out why there is a certain trend and what are the most marked patterns among your visitors.

Don't forget to compare the data you collect: periodicity, topics, content, products, what works best and what strategies should be changed. Just as the metrics need to be very specific, the data also needs to be concrete, measurable and substantial.

Some data you should pay much more attention to are:

8. Review, analyze and verify

Do this step as many times as you deem necessary. Web analysis is constant, only then can you ensure that your site's optimization is up to date with trends and positively responds to users' needs. We recommend that you do this analysis on a monthly or quarterly basis to detect opportunities or problems early.

Share the information with your collaborators so that they all provide valuable information, help make quick decisions and achieve goals on time.

Key Indicators for Web Analytics

One of the keys to achieving good web analytics is the correct identification of the indicators that allow you to measure the key aspects of your business. It will be useless to have a large set of data if they do not become valuable information for the operation and improvement of your business.

To achieve efficiency, some of the most relevant indicators are:

Other useful indicators 

There are also several other useful indicators such as:
A simpler way to measure the evolution of your indicators is to divide them by steps:

Attract

Useful metrics: origin of visits, visits that entered your company / brand name, new visitors; recurring visitors, percentage of new and recurring visitors, percentage of new visits.

Convert

Useful metrics: visits to contact page, contact forms received, subscriptions, content downloads.      

Retain

Useful metrics: time spent on the site, number of page views per visit, more engaging content.

Every business is unique and has different needs. As you implement your strategies and campaigns, you will also be able to see which metrics are most relevant to your business.

SWOT analysis of a website

SWOT analysis of a website is the interpretation of the data and it is not just about graphing the results or observations; but to start implementing changes with the information collected in the web analysis.

A SWOT analysis is a study tool that aims to analyze the internal and external characteristics of a company. For a web analysis it is also quite functional, as it allows to separate each data obtained to have a clearer view of the situation.

To functionally combat detected threats, you can implement:

Conclusion 

As you have understood through the content of this article, web analytics is a crucial process for the proper functioning and sustainability of a business.

Now that you know all the processes, it is important that you have better tools at your disposal to achieve the desired success.

Thus, we propose you to discover the SEO Personal Dashboard: an all-in-one tool that will help you accomplish even the most complex tasks in no time. With the help of this tool, you are sure to collect the right information in real time.