In this article, we'll explain how you can make web analytics work for you, no matter what type of business you are, 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 to make other websites work for you?
Let's start right away! 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 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.
1. Use that information to help you achieve your business goals
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 you are interested in. This means that you are now in search.
Then, when you enter a website, you may do a number of actions, such as reviewing daily rates, checking available room types, browsing 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 place.
At this point you are not yet ready to make a reservation, you are still searching, but you may put one of the houses you have found among your options, and you may even subscribe to his messages to receive his offers by 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 your reservation decision, you clicked on the message, you went to the website and you made your reservation.
Therein lies the power of analytics, as it can help businesses gauge what's going on at every stage of the customer journey.
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2. Find out how people learn about your activity
Analytics can teach you the search engines through which users find you, and the pages to which they are directed.
After that, you can tell you if visitors interacted with your activity when they entered your website or not.
For example, did they browse the site and then subscribe to receive your messages about everything new about your site via email? Or did they hit the back button in their browser and move on to the following option? Analyses can also measure the percentage of successful visitor referrals, i.e.
If they have completed the goals you want to follow, such as subscribing to mailings and booking as in the previous example.
Another great thing that analytics can do is that it can tell us about the return of visitors and when they become customers who frequent the site.
When analytics are well prepared, can you 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 every stage of a client's journey.
Then, use analytics to measure your progress towards these goals, and identify obstacles to achieving them.
For example, a guest house may have the goal of getting fifty reservations a month, using analytics, you may find out that the booking system baffles people, and therefore potential customers leave your site, and may make reservations elsewhere.
This is certainly not good, but the same information is good, as it identifies what needs to be fixed, and leads - as we hope - to the decision to put some time and resources into making the booking process faster and easier, and this is the secret to progress, having data without action will not help.
Summary
Well, we've explained a lot about this, so let's get it right! Analytics can become the basis for measuring and supporting all your online efforts, while helping you measure what is happening and understand the different stages of a client's online journey, highlighting the good aspects of it.
It also shows you which citizen needs improvement, so set your goals, values your progress, then use your data to grow your activity.