As an online business owner, you must put so many efforts into digital marketing and search engine marketing. If you don’t have a mechanism for measuring the efficiency of your marketing functions, you will never be able to identify problem areas. You can’t rectify errors, and exploit the full potential of your resources. To fill this gap, Web Analytics Tools come into equation. And in this article, you will find everything about web analytics tools.
Marketing on digital platforms is a complex system comprising many processes. Online marketers have to make decisions and execute actions vis-à-vis various marketing activities. These include email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, optimizing for search engines, and so on. The focal point of all these functions is to bring traffic to the website.
It doesn’t end with bringing visitors to the website. A new journey starts from there. Only expanding the upper opening of your sales funnel isn’t enough. You have to nurture your leads into buyers which is yet another whole process.
To fulfil all your marketing objectives, you need to have adequate comprehensible data on user behavior across web pages. Or else, how’d you know whether or not your efforts are paying off?
What is a web analytics tool?
As an online marketer, you employ various inbound and outbound marketing programs to increase traffic on your website. But how would you measure the success of these campaigns? Sure, you can get an idea with the number of subscribers, purchases, and other forms of engagements that your website receives. Such kind of data only gives a very loose and vague idea. And this isn’t enough for effective marketing.
This is where Web Analytics tools come into play. Such software applications are designed to help online businesses compare the outcomes of their marketing efforts with their goals.
These tools are crucial for data handling in marketing. With web analytics tools, digital marketers can effectively collect, report, and analyse data in a way that it gives valuable insights. This further helps businesses come up with actionable solutions.
What type of data can you obtain with the help of analytics tools?
Web analytics tools typically use a dashboard to display different types of data. The information provided there answers different data related queries. For example, such questions can be broken down into following categories:
– Audience data related questions
- What is the total number of monthly visitors?
- How many new visitors the website received over a particular period of time?
- What is the ratio between new visitors v/s returning visitors?
- From which geographical location your visitors come?
- How many desktop users v/s mobile users visit your website?
– Questions related to visitors’ behaviour on website
- Which is the page on your website most visitors land on?
- What are the most common exit pages on your website?
- Which pages are visited most frequently?
- How many pages on an average are accessed per visit?
- What is the dwell time of visitors on your website?
- What is the bounce rate of your website?
– Questions related to campaign data
- Which campaign was the most successful in driving traffic?
- Referrals from what websites generated the most traffic?
- What are the keywords searches that resulted in the most visits?
- What’s been the success of social media marketing campaign v/s email marketing campaign?
Finding answers to these questions can help take your digital marketing, SEO, and website development strategies to a different level.
Once you get your hands on these data, the next will be to employ this knowledge into bettering your visitors’ user experience. Below is a list of…
Best web analytics practices
– Analyse to improve
The whole point of web analytics is to obtain comprehensible data and actionable insights. These can help you better your marketing strategies, campaigns, website’s performance and so on. Therefore, it’s important to begin with a mind-set of improving when practicing analytics.
– Don’t focus on traffic reports only
People spend hours on internet. They visit various websites in a day and generally forget the names. So, the fact that someone visited your website doesn’t amount to much in isolation. They might or might not engage with your website in a meaningful manner. Therefore, don’t base your decision only on traffic reports.
– Data should be insightful
Merely throwing metrics with no useful insight defeats the main purpose of web analytics. To be able to identify problem areas, rectify errors and, improve it. It’s important to report data that communicates meaning in relation to initial goals, objectives, KPIs and other attributes.
– Keep patience
SEO and other marketing functions are processes that generally require time and patience to make real impacts. Hence, jumping onto conclusions based on a short duration report is something you should avoid.
– Be transparent in communicating data
It is important to be transparent when communicating data with the stakeholders of the business. Be it strengths or weaknesses, convey everything with clarity.
Some of the best Web Analytics tools
Which one to choose? This is the question you’ll have to find answers, when looking for a web analytics tool. Below is the list of some of the best web analytics tools:
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Analytics
- Ahrefs
- SEMRush
- Mixpanel
- CrazyEgg
- Clicktale
- Moz Pro
- MarketingCloudFX
- Clicky
What web analytics tool should you use?
All these tools share some basic functions and have some unique features. There are even more tools and the numbers only keep increasing. Identify your goals, preffered KPIs and so on. Then research about tools and compare their specifications with your needs. This way, you will be able to end up on the tool that provides most value to your business.
You may find difficult to settling for a single tool. One might be good for real-time tracking and the other for offering granular history data. Therefore, you should always use more than one tools for effective web analytics.
Conclusion
Web analytics is an important element of search engine optimization. It allows you to collect, process, and analyse important website data in relation to visitors and digital marketing campaigns driving the traffic. The same is crucial for measuring performance, identifying issues, rectifying errors, and improve overall UX on your website. This way, you can optimize lead generation and conversion funnel of your businesses. All this can’t be achieved without automation. Identify your requirements and find out web analytics tools that corresponds the best.
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