In this article, we'll explain how you can make web analytics work for you, regardless of your type of business, and learn how analytics can help you track and measure what visitors are doing on your site, and use that information to help you achieve your business goals.
How you can make web analytics work for you
If you use it appropriately, web analytics can become the foundation for the online side of your business, because it can measure the performance of any type of online marketing you decide to do, from search to ad serving, social media to email.
At the same time, analytics measures the entire digital journey of a customer on your site, from the first visit until they become a regular customer.
This is great, isn't it? Let's take an example and suppose that you have a guest house or a “bed and breakfast hotel”, and one of your goals is to have a website through which visitors book their rooms on the Internet. Reservations are the source of profits for you.
Analytics can measure which reservations have been confirmed, and also gather important statistics on the factors that trigger or track that reservation, all along the customer's journey through your site.
So, what does that mean exactly? Let's review the customer journey before making a reservation. If you are looking for a guest house, say in Dubai, for a trip you will take three months from now.
The first thing you might do is search on the internet for a term like “guest house in Dubai”, which will bring you to the results page, and then spend some time clicking on the websites of some of the guest houses that have piqued your interest. research.
Then, when you enter a website, you may do a number of actions, such as review the daily rates, check the types of rooms available, browse some reviews or recommendations to get a better idea of the guest house, or you may even look at some pictures to get a feel of the nature of the place.
At this point, you're not yet ready to make a reservation, you're still searching, but you may put one of the homes you have found in your options, and you may even subscribe to his messages to receive his offers via e-mail to ensure you take advantage of any promotions.
But after two weeks, you get an email about a ten percent discount on the room you liked, and the offer includes the days you plan to travel.
At this point, you've already done a little research, but you haven't booked yet, and this email was just what you needed to make a reservation decision.
You clicked on the message, you went to the website and you made your reservation.
This is where the power of analytics lies, as they can help businesses gauge what's going on at every stage of the customer journey.
How analytics helps you track and measure what visitors are doing on your site
Do you want to know how people learn about your activity? Web analytics can tell you which search engines users are finding you through, and which pages they are directed to.
Then, it can tell you whether visitors interacted with your activity when they came to your website.
For example, did they browse the site and then subscribe so that they receive your messages about everything new on your site via e-mail? Or did they hit the back button in their browser and go to the next option?
Web analytics can also measure visitor conversions, or example, if they complete the goals you want to track, such as signing up for newsletters and booking, as in the previous example.
Another great thing that analytics can do is that they can tell us when visitors are back and when they become a frequent customer.
And when the web analytics are well set up, they can tell us if loyal customers start promoting you, for example, if they share your content with other users on social networks?
The best way to make analytics a powerful tool that helps you understand how people use your website, and thus improve it, is to set clear, specific, and measurable goals at each stage of the customer journey.
Use the information to help you achieve your business goals
Next, use analytics to measure your progress toward these goals, and identify barriers to achieving them.
For example, a guest house might have a goal of getting fifty reservations per month, using analytics.
You might discover that the reservation system is confusing people, so potential customers leave your site, and may make a reservation elsewhere.
It's certainly not good, but the information itself is good, as it identifies what needs fixing, and hopefully leads to the decision to put in some time and resources to make the booking process faster and easier, and that's the secret of progress, having data without taking action isn't going to help.
Well, we've got a lot to say about it, so let's cut it short! Analytics can become the foundation that measures and underpins all your online efforts, as well as helping you measure what's going on and understand the different stages of a customer's online journey, and bring out the good in it.
It also shows you what needs improvement, so set your goals, evaluate your progress, and then use your data to grow your business.
See: How Video Complements Your Online Strategy