Web analytics is not new to the digital world. However, there are still some people who don’t understand it well enough to utilize it effectively in their jobs, projects, or businesses.

What is web analytics?

Web analytics is simply the collection, reporting, and analysis of your website’s data — its focus is identifying the measures which are based on your user and organizational goals.

It helps determine the failure or success of your website’s goals using data gathered to come up with a strategy and improve the user experience (UX) of your site.

How to measure content in website analytics?

Creating objectives and Call-to-Action (CTA) based on your organizational and site visitor goals are both essential in developing effective and relevant website analysis.

In addition, identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure failures or success is needed for the objectives and CTA.

• Goals: this is your website’s foremost goals and should essentially outline your reason for having a website.
• Objectives: this helps your outline and defines the things needed to achieve your goals.
• CTA: these are action tasks that your website visitors should complete as part of both your goals and objectives.
• KPIs: these are metrics in which you measure your CTA.

Measuring a website’s success comes in numerous KPIs and requires multiple tools. By simplifying and focusing on the KPIs that you only need to be able to measure your organizational and site visitor goals, you’ll be able to take out only the data needed to determine the right insight. This makes managing website analytics easier.

Here are some website analytics best practices:

Website analytics strongly supports your qualitative research and test finding and these best practices are what you need.

1. Encourage a data-driven environment to help you with decision making

Once you have collected the relevant data to help you determine whether you have met or failed to meet your goals and know what you can do to improve your KPIs.

2. Don’t just provide traffic reports

Reporting about website visits, top sources, top pages, and pageviews only scan the surface — you have to keep in mind that large numbers can be misleading — just because there is a lot of traffic or more time spent on your website, it doesn’t mean that there is a success.

3. Always back up insights with data

Reporting metrics to your stakeholders without insights that tie-in to their business or their site user goals only misses the point. Always keep in mind to make your data relevant and meaningful by showing why the website data reveals areas of success and improvement.

4. Prevent being snapshot-focused when reporting

Focusing only within a specific time period of visits does not capture the essence and richer website experiences that happen online — pan-session metrics like visitors, user-lifetime value, and other essential values that provide a long-term understanding of site users allows you to know and evaluate how your website is doing as it interacts with visitors and returning visitors in the long run.

5. Always communicate clearly with stakeholders

Always stay consistent with the information you provide — know your website audience and determine the weakness of your system, and disclose them to your stakeholders. This keeps transparency and trust.

Determine your goals and make decisions

Determining your goals helps you know which metrics show failure or success — you’ll easily understand where changes and improvements are needed to ensure that reach your goals if you have the right metrics on your hand.

Goals should always be specific and not be too granular so you’ll be able to uncover different situations earlier and have more time to adjust your strategy.

The key to understanding the basics of website analytics is determining what the basic metrics are — understanding what drives those metrics and how you should utilize them.

Conclusion

More and more businesses are spending their time online — improving their digital marketing and understanding their website analytics further. Unless you know how your website is performing, there nothing much you can to increase your business’ efficiency and profitability.

Your knowledge about website analytics is a valuable tool to help your business grow, especially in having such tough competition in this digital age.

For more information on website analytics, download our Web Development ebook.

Are you looking for help in understanding and using website analytics for your website? Talk to one of our web development specialists now!