Imagine your site as being a store or even a restaurant. You need to fill empty shelves, control your stock, optimize your shelves to make sure a product is visible to your customers, etc. Analyze data from your visitors is a key information to learn how your visitors browse your site, if they find what they were looking for…
There’s a lot of web analytic tools out there but if you want to use one, Google Analytics is probably the most popular, easy to use and free tool for webmasters.
Know your visitors
Your visitors data allow you to understand their behavior ,what they want, what they expect to see or find while visiting your website. Ignoring them would be a mistake! Google Analytics allow you to track:
- Time a visitor spend on your site
- Where they come from, which site they visited before landing on your website
- Bounce rate: how many visitors visited one page and literally “bounced”
- Conversion funnel
- What device they used
- etc
There’s many more information that Google Analytics gives you and you can go as deep as you want in the analysis.
By analyzing those data or at least trends, you will understand their behavior more accurately and instead of guessing at least you will be able to find the right questions if not the right answers.
Modify your strategy
Now that you have a better knowledge of what your visitors want, you can modify your strategy if you had one and start a new one if you didn’t. For example, if you realize your visitors are visiting your site mostly from their phone and if you don’t have a mobile friendly site, you know that by making that move it will impact your business immediately. If you have a big red button somewhere on your page and you realize nobody clicks on it, may be the color is not the right choice, or the text is not really appealing. If most of your traffic comes from external links, may be working on your Search Engine Optimization would make a big difference…etc. You can really analyze everything and anything and make the changes to increase your traffic, increase the retention or increase the sales…whatever your site goal is.
You can also look at specific pages, see if people are leaving your site immediately after visiting certain pages for example. That tells you that there must be something wrong with that specific page. There’s no right or wrong. Web Analytics don’t tell you what to you, but at least tell you what’s wrong and gives you clue on what potentially you can try to fix it. Once you make a change it’s not final, you wait, you analyze again and see if it made a difference. Don’t be afraid to make changes! And NEVER think that one change is final either. You might improve a part of your site for the next 3 months, then realize that something is “wrong” again. Nothing is wrong really, but technology changes and user’s behaviors too. They search differently, they browse differently, they consume differently. That’s why I started saying that your website is like a store or a restaurant, you have to take care of it all the time making sure that it’s not outdated, that it still works properly…etc. More often than not people get a website for a reason they ignore themselves, because everybody has one or because they think they should have one but they don’t have a lot of understanding as to why, how, what for, or that this could be their best sale rep ever.
What about Return on Investment?
A website is not free. It cost money to build, to host, to maintain. If you pay for advertising it adds to the cost. Web Analytics can help you track your return on investment (ROI) as well.
Google Analytics of course works great with Google Adwords, Google’s advertising platform. If you want to spend a little bit of money to advertise your business this is the best, most cost efficient tool. Plugged with Google Analytics it will give you even more information about your visitors. You can for example determine that a lead worth let’s say $100. So it’s easy math. If you create a conversion goal when a customer fills a form for example and you know that the value of that lead is $100, if you have 100 forms in a month, it represents $100 * 100. Now let’s say your conversion rate is 10%. Easy math again. You would make $100 *10=$1000. If the maintenance cost of your website is $100 a month you are still making some money:) It’s just an example of course. Now imagine that by analyzing your data and making the changes that make sense you increase that 10% conversion rate by 5% even this is already great! If you have more leads or cost per lead is higher…etc, your website could be a great source of income for your business or bring you more customers than if you didn’t have it…whatever you business might be.
You understand now why analyzing your data is something that can make a BIG difference for your business.
Do you have questions? Do you need help with your website? Contact us.
