Pageviews, session duration, bounce rate, traffic sources — these are just a handful of the metrics that website-analytics professionals keep a close eye on day in and day out. And for brands looking to increase the effectiveness of their website and maximize the benefits it delivers to their business, they’re all critical terms that company decision-makers should be well aware of, too.
Why? When it comes to generating online success, the importance of website analytics cannot be underestimated — and brands that fail to harness it are missing a big opportunity to evolve, grow and increase the business-boosting power of their online assets.
Consider these seven big benefits that website analytics can deliver for your brand and its online efforts:
1. Enhanced consumer understanding
A visitor’s behavior on your brand’s website can tell you a lot about his or her interests, preferences, and engagement level, along with offering clues on where visiting consumers might be in their path to purchase. Website analytics can shed light on all these things. Further, analytics tools can offer audience demographic information such as geographic location, gender, age and more. And by better understanding these things about your consumers, your brand can tailor its message to better speak to and motivate them, plus harness this data to target more potential customers like them and attract them to your site.
2. Improved user experience
Website analytics can also help you pinpoint any weaknesses that might exist on your brand’s website that could be creating impediments and frustration along the consumer journey. For example, if analytical data shows that higher-than-average numbers of visitors are abandoning your website on the contact page, you may want to dig into that page to determine if it needs a revamp. Similarly, if a specific web form produces fewer submissions than others on your site, this could indicate a problem there that needs to be addressed. And by using analytics to identify such issues on your site and subsequently fixing them, your brand can improve its site’s user experience.
3. Insights on your content’s appeal
Website analytics can help you identify which types of content on your site are drawing in the most visitors and keeping them on your pages for the longest sessions — insights that can help you create more content along those lines, attract more website visitors and keep them around long enough to convert. For example, if you find that how-to blog articles or videos on your site are bringing in the most traffic, it may make good strategic sense to create more content like it, as doing so is likely to rev up your visitor numbers. This same information can also be used for other helpful purposes, such as letting you know which pages on your site might be good places to consider adding more calls to action, potentially increasing your site’s conversions.
4. SEO advantages
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to increase the amount of organic traffic your site receives, potentially resulting in more leads and conversions — and website analytics can boost your brand’s SEO efforts in a number of ways. For example, by using analytics to gain a better grasp of who your site’s visitors are, you can create more content tailored to appeal to these visitors. That can increase your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) when consumers search for these topics. Similarly, analytical data can help you track what search queries and keywords are bringing the most traffic to your site, plus help you assess what visitors might be looking for on your site and whether they’re finding it there. All of that can further inform your SEO strategies.
5. Added referral insights
Analytical data can also show you which outside sources are bringing the most traffic to your website — some of which your brand may have been previously unaware of. Once these leading sources have been identified, your brand can focus more efforts on maximizing the numbers of visitors they deliver. Such information can also give you insights on new geographic areas you may want to target with your brand’s marketing, industry segments you should be focusing on and even new languages you might want to consider translating your content into.
6. eCommerce enlightenment
For brands that sell products and services online, website analytics tools can provide a wealth of information that can be harnessed to drive more informed tactical decisions — and ultimately increase online sales. Some of the most important KPIs that analytics-provided data can help eCommerce brands track and optimize include top products, top referral sources, conversion rates, total revenue, average order value, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, cart abandonment rate and return on ad spend. And by analyzing this information, brands can determine which optimization efforts are working and which aren’t, helping them decide which to pour more resources into and which to abandon.
7. Better brand decision-making
Ultimately, the more data your brand can leverage about its website, its functionality and its visitors, the more informed it can be when making a broad range of related business decisions. From determining what website, platform and app features need attention to allocating your marketing budget, enhancing your SEO efforts and more, harnessing the insights that web analytics can provide can help your brand make better, growth-focused business decisions.
How to monitor your website traffic
Today’s marketing professionals have a range of web analytics tools available to them — and when interpreted by people with the right expertise, they can generate an array of valuable (and actionable) insights for boosting the effectiveness of your brand’s website and other online assets.
Some of the leading tools for monitoring your brand’s website traffic and user behavior include:
Google Analytics
Offered at no charge by search engine giant Google, Google Analytics provides a set of tools businesses can use to monitor the performance of their online assets and gain valuable insights about their website visitors and app users.
Microsoft Clarity
A free behavioral analytics tool offered by tech giant Microsoft, Microsoft Clarity can shed light on how visitors use a brand’s website, and it can also identify which site pages and features generate the most user engagement.
Adobe Analytics
Geared toward helping businesses collect, process, analyze and share data about the customer journey on their websites, Adobe Analytics can be an especially attractive option for brands that are already using multiple Adobe Suite solutions.
Userbrain
Designed to help brands measure and validate the user experience (UX) on their websites, Userbrain enables the fast and easy creation of remote user tests. Once built and deployed, these tests can quickly deliver UX insights by helping identify any usability issues with websites and their features.
Need the help of a team of professional marketers and analytics experts to better monitor your website’s traffic and performance, then act on the insights this uncovers? At Brandon, we can cover all of your marketing needs, whether you’re seeking assistance with analytics, help with your website-design needs, guidance for your paid social media efforts, digital media & targeting expertise — or anything else. To get started with help ranging from a simple website analysis to a comprehensive strategy tailored to boost the performance of all of your marketing campaigns, contact us today.