What Is Web Analytics? What Is It For?

What is Web Analytics?

The Web Analytics Association (an international reference association related to web analytics) defines web analytics as ” the measurement, processing, analysis, and reporting of internet traffic to understand and optimize the use of a website .”

Web analytics is a discipline that is part of digital marketing, which consists of collecting and interpreting data related to users who land on our web pages, where we can analyze in detail the results of marketing actions and make more accurate decisions.

To properly manage our digital business it is necessary to optimize our website to sell more or attract more customers and identify our correct audience and connect with it; The transformation of this data is important to add value to our business and identify areas for improvement.

Web analytics is one more step towards success since to analyze correctly we have to be clear about our objectives based on key performance indicators, with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) we will evaluate those factors, variables, and units of measurement of marketing strategies depending on each type of business.

It is important to clarify that web analytics is not about measuring our website traffic, but about understanding and analyzing it through the impact of our digital marketing campaigns, the behavior of visitors on the website, and looking for market trends.

Thanks to web analytics we can compile the data with the appropriate metrics to analyze the performance of our websites. In this way, we evaluate whether we meet the proposed objectives when starting any type of marketing campaign.

Steps to analyzing a website

To analyze any portal, we recommend that you follow the following steps:

• Choose the type of website we find: an online store (eCommerce, registration portal, a blog, a corporate website.
• Establish site objectives and KPIs (key performance indicators).
• Establish the period in which the data will be collected.
• Choose the appropriate tool to perform the analysis.
• Analyze the structure of the website, we have to see how it is organized, the process that users follow to reach the goal.
• Tag the different pages of our website so that the data can be measured. Each page of the site must have its specific URL.
• Measure and get reports.
• Review the reports, analyze the data and make changes that are necessary to achieve the established objectives.

Tools to do Web Analytics

• Google Tag Manager: Google Tag Manager is a tool that allows us to simplify the process of managing website tags, through these tags we update the website, and also these tags allow us to measure the objectives within Google Analytics and Google Ads.
• Google Analytics: Google Analytics is currently the most important tool for web analytics, this platform launched in 2005, allows us to group all the traffic of our website according to a purchase and/or acquisition behavior; Google Analytics has allowed us to reach a global way the behavior of users within our website with accurate information.
• Google Search Console: Search Console is a free service offered by Google to monitor problems with the appearance of our web pages in search results, which allows us to detect usability and indexing problems from any search device.
• Hotjar: Hotjar is a reference tool that allows us to analyze user interaction and experience on the website, through heat maps, visitor recordings, surveys, and comments.
• Data Studio: Data Studio is a free tool that allows us to convert all the data we obtain in Google into clear reports and dashboards, processes the data, transfers the information in a readable way, and updates the data instantly.
• Supermetrics: Supermetrics is a tool that is capable of monitoring and analyzing metrics automatically, in this way, we can measure and control the results of the marketing strategies of the different platforms where we advertise.
• Adobe Analytics: It is a tool that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform web analysis, it collects data from any source, including voice data.

Web Analytics Metrics

Marketing metrics are numerical expressions that visualize the results of our strategies, allow us to analyze the performance of the actions of the marketing department, in line with the objectives we had from the beginning; Among the most important metrics that cannot be missed when conducting an analysis are:

• Unique or exclusive visitors: These are the users that Google Analytics considers to have visited your website at a certain time.
• Percentage of new visits: It is important to differentiate between recurring users and new visitors, for this metric indicates the percentage of new users who have come to our website.
• Visited pages: Corresponds to the number of pages that are loaded, it is defined as the total number of pages viewed on a website.
• Pages/visit: It is an average that is carried out to know the number of pages that have been seen in a visit.
• Average time on the page and average duration of the visit: It indicates the average duration of the session
• Bounce rate: It refers to the total number of sessions in which a user has left the web page without interacting with it.
• Exit percentage: This percentage indicates that of all the visits which have been the last session.
• Traffic channels: This metric analyzes where our website traffic comes from, so we can establish from which channel our users come, here we find the payment channel, display, organic, direct, social referral, and email.

Advanced metrics (KPI)

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are the main performance indicators. They are metrics that help us understand how we are doing concerning the objectives we have set. Since each company has different objectives, the KPIs are specific to each business. Next, we are going to propose some KPIs, depending on the type of website we are on:

Corporate websites: the objective of this type of site could be to spread the name of the company or brand, attract loyal traffic (repeat visits):

• Recurring users = recurring visitors / unique visitors
• Visits depth = pageviews / visit
• Conversion rate = leads / visits

Content websites: the objective could be to attract traffic and users who repeat their visits (to retain the user). This is the case of a blog or a news website:

• New Visitor Rate = New Visitors / Unique Visitors
• Visits depth = pageviews / visit
• Conversion rate = contacts or subscriptions / visits

Service websites: the objective could be to attract new clients or generate contact requests/quotes. This is the case of a website of a law firm:

• Visits depth = pageviews / visit
• Conversion rate = contacts or requests / visits
• Bounce rate = visits that only viewed one page/total visits

Sales websites: the goal is to get sales. For example, an online store:

• Income per visit = total income / visits
• Average quantity per order = total revenue/number of sales
• Conversion rate = number of sales / visits

Report, improve and optimize your website

The real work is when we have to read the data and interpret it, in such a way that as analysts we can conclude to improve the user experience and also manage strategies for customer loyalty, satisfaction, acquisition, retention, and loyalty; web analytics arises from the need to measure the return on investment of each visit to our website.

We must recognize that each user of our website is providing valuable information for my company, to know the needs of my market niche, and correctly guide the strategies. Web analytics helps me recognize my strengths and weaknesses in the digital world, and that is where you begin to become a web analyst. Are we getting to know our clients?