Web Analytics and How to Use Them

by May 31, 2017Blog, Marketing, Strategy | Entrepreneurship

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Congrats on setting up your website! Now you can just brush it to the side and let the dust settle as you continue to work on the day-to-day of the storefront. Or like a smart business owner, you can begin to use the website to your advantage to gain some valuable web analytic data. But why exactly should your business use web analytics? Well first and foremost, it allows you to learn about the people viewing you online. Those customers are just as important as those visiting your store every day. With that data, you can learn more about them and optimize your website better to improve the process of acquiring new business.

What to Look For and Do

Acquisition

With all this data, how do you know what to look for? One major area that I look at is how we are acquiring these customers. Are they searching for the site through a search on Google or did you acquire them through an advertisement you set up on Facebook? With the SERPs (more on that later) report and the Google Keyword Planner, we can start looking at what searches brought the user to the website. These keywords are the primary words that people are typing to bring you up on a google search. These tools allow you to improve these keywords for SEO but also to look at what words are bringing customers to your competitor’s websites.

Behavior

The behavior of your customer online is very important to understand how they use your website. It shows what pages are doing well and where you need to improve. You may have set up a new download on your landing page, but you noticed that viewers are immediately leaving the page after a couple of seconds. There could be a number of reasons, but these analytics allow for a deeper dive to understand what is going on and why you may be having this problem.

Conversions

One of the most important factors of web analytics is that you are able to measure the success of your goals. You can do this by setting up key performance indicators (KPIs). This is where a lot of the fun comes in and you can really start using the power of web analytics. You can begin to measure if you made enough online sales in the last quarter, whether you received enough traffic each month on your website, or if your social media is getting people to the website to turn them into leads. With this data, you can learn what’s working and what’s not. From that, you can optimize your website and try different strategies.

Optimize Your Marketing

Marketing is a continuous process of tinkering and perfecting. Thanks to web analytics, marketers have a new best friend. We can now see the success of our marketing, but also what we need to do to change and perfect that marketing process. We suggest lots of testing to continuously improve how your marketing works. The more you test and tinker, the higher your numbers and data will rise.

What Analytics Tools to Use

Google Analytics – The most powerful, popular and free analytics tool to use is Google Analytics. It is relatively easy for anyone to understand and it doesn’t hurt that it is free. The only tough part can be setting up the snippet code on your website. If you have a WordPress site, there are a lot of plug-ins to help set this up easily. Once set up, you will really have the power to start learning about your customers. It may seem overwhelming at first, but Google makes it simple with a plethora of tutorials and ways to get your questions answered easily.

Facebook Insights – Google Analytics can give you a lot of info about your social media as well, but if you want to really get more of the nitty-gritty info, then I suggest going straight to the source. With Facebook’s Insights, you get a quick assessment of your customer demographic and what they are engaging with. This is an invaluable source to improve your social media presence and the content that you are distributing.

Serps – If you want to improve where you rank on your Google Search, then SERP is the software that we suggest. This allows us to do a deep dive into the keywords that we talked about above. With this data, you can begin adjusting the copy of your website to improve these keywords. In the end, this helps improve our search ranking and drive traffic to our website.

Megalytics – With so much data for your business, it can be a little overwhelming to take in. For most of our analytic reports, we use a program called Megalytic. It gathers information from your social media accounts, Google Analytics, and throws it in one neatly organized spreadsheet. You can then take this info and put it into graphs and pie charts for a much more visual representation of the data from month to month. This not only conveys the data but does it in a way that anyone can understand.

Web analytics is important to anyone that is looking to improve their business. We may think we know our customers, but this data allows us to learn more about them and get a better understanding of why they love your company.

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