What is Web Analytics?

In a nutshell, web analytics is capturing data about your website’s visitors and using this information to improve your website and online activities in order to generate more business.

For example, knowing how people find your website, which of the website pages turn up most often in search engine results or which pages convert most visitors to customers will help you know where to concentrate effort in order to attract more visitors and increase sales.

Most businesses turn to analytics with three goals in mind:

  1. To convert more website visitors into customers.
  2. To attract more relevant visitors to their website.
  3. To increase the number of visitors who keep returning to the website.

Good Web Analytics is built on Good Data

The starting point is your website data. It provides the foundation upon which conclusions will be drawn and decisions made. So it is essential that it is clean and captures the information you need to be able to assess your websites’ performance.

In order to gain the insights needed to drive up visitor conversions you must identify and measure the steps in the conversion process. This is called your measurement plan, it will contain your Key Performance Indicators: they will be made up of micro-conversions – small steps that lead towards your ultimate goal and macro-conversions – the ultimate goal itself, usually a sales enquiry or a purchase.

Start to gain insights into your website visitors

Once you are collecting data, the next step is to create reports and to start to analyse the information in order to understand more about the website visitors: their characteristics, what they are looking for and their online experience.

This information can then used to:

  • Focus visitor acquisition strategy on acquiring the most relevant visitors
  • Assess the effectiveness of your marketing decisions and advertising
  • Improving the user experience of the website, for example by identifying pain points that discourage conversions or trying out different styles for web pages to see how visitors react.