Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data. The focus is on identifying measures based on your website and goals. For website owners, data means everything. The data can present the current challenges and help to develop relevant objectives and calls-to-action from your organizational and site visitors goals, and identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success or failures for those objectives and calls-to-action.
So What is Web Analytic?
Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of the visitors to a website. Several areas you need to pay attention to are tracking, reviewing and reporting data to measure web activity, including the use of a website and its components, such as webpages, images and videos.
Why Web Analytic is Needed
It is hard to measure the progress of a website, especially when conversions do not take place such as: sales, inquiry or lead generation. The data collected through web analytics may include traffic sources, referring sites, page views, paths taken and conversion rates.
The date from the analytics can help you to make crucial changes on your website and determine which areas need improvement. It helps to facilitate and streamline better business decisions.
Web analytics can help in the following ways:
- Determine the likelihood that a given customer will repurchase a product after purchasing it in the past.
- Personalize the site to customers who visit it repeatedly.
- Monitor the amount of money individual customers or specific groups of customers spend.
- Observe the geographic regions from which the most and the least customers visit the site and purchase specific products.
- Predict which products customers are most and least likely to buy in the future.
Best Practices for Web Analytic
Web analytics can strongly support the qualitative research and testing finding. Some best practices to keep in mind related to this field are:
- Encourage a data-driven environment for decision making. We can’t mention this strong enough. The relevant data collected provide the answers whether you have met (or fail to meet) your goals, find out what you can do to improve your KPIs. Utilize testing tools to try out different solutions and find the best placement that generates the most engagement for that page.
- Avoid only providing traffic reports. Reporting about visits, pageviews, top sources, or top pages only skims the surface. Large numbers can be misleading; just because there is more traffic or time spent on site doesn’t mean that there is success. Reporting these numbers is largely tactical; after all, what do 1 million visits have to do with the success of your program?
- Always provide insights with the data. Reporting metrics to your stakeholders with no insights or tie-ins to your business or user goals misses the point. Make the data relevant and meaningful by demonstrating how the website data shows areas of success and of improvement on your site.
- Avoid being snapshot-focused in reporting. Focusing on visits or looking only within a specific time period doesn’t capture the richer and more complex web experiences that are happening online now. Pan-session metrics, such as visitors, user-lifetime value, and other values that provide longer-term understanding of people and users, allow you to evaluate how your website has been doing as it matures and as it interacts with visitors, especially the returning ones.
- Communicate clearly with stakeholders/partners. Be consistent in the information you provide, know your audience, and know the weaknesses of your system and disclose them to your stakeholders/partners.