Importance of website analytics
Here’s the thing – your website is like your very own party, to which you’re giving out all the invites, but are people showing up to the party? If they are, are they even enjoying the party?
Well, here is where website analytics becomes a part of your party, and helps you to see how many guests came, and how to turn your website into the only website guests are excited about! Not only this, but they also help you understand how long each guest stays, what they engage with and things that could be improved.
From a sea of numbers to easy dashboards
However, if you’re someone who is easily overwhelmed by a lot of data, who feels data is just a sea of numbers, or is simply not using data to its full potential, wait no more.
With website analytics, you get the chance to simplify your complex website analytics into a dataset, that helps you make decisions critical for your website.
But what even are website analytics?
Website analytics are your one-stop solution to all your questions – what do I do to make my website better? Well, essentially it tracks the data for users, which once decoded, can help you make data-driven decisions.
Which data is tracked?
Now you might be wondering – what data can we even track from website analytics? Well, here is a list of metrics that can be tracked, giving you an insight into your website performance.
- Visitor Numbers – this helps you see how many visitors a website has, when is it particularly busy, and which pages are hit (or miss).
- Visitor Sources – this metric helps in understanding where are the visitors coming from, thus showing which channel is the best for you to present your paid ads, thus breaking everything down, from the channels to the direct traffic, for you.
- Conversion rate – this is a critical metric. It allows you to see how many people came through to the call to action posted and can help you see to what extent are your target projects fulfilled.
- Bounce rate – this rate allows you to see the average time that people spend on your website, and how many people just chose to bounce off in a limited time. This can help in showing areas of engagement for your website, as well as for individual website pages.
Which website analytics tool is just right for you?
Well, we understand that website analytics is all the rave right now, but what’s crucial to understand is which website analytics tool is your best friend to make these data-driven decisions.
Starting from Google Analytics, which is supposedly the undisputed heavyweight of the analytics game. It has several features, that might be highly engaging, however, its interface can be quite overwhelming for people who don’t have the know-how for numbers and its data privacy practices are also quite questionable, to say the least.
Alongside this, we also have Matamo. This is where all your privacy concerns will go away, giving you multiple options for a quick basic website analysis. However, when it comes to an advanced analysis, Matamo is not a pro and has limited features for an in-depth analysis.
Lastly, there’s clicky. This is the real-time data champion and provides insights into the visitor's mind right in real time. However, it is unable to provide an in-depth analysis, thus limiting its capabilities.
Now that we have seen all these amazing website analytic tools and how they are all lacking in one way or the other, let us come to the lifesaver for your website – Trackboxx.
This is your solution for all the website analytics problems, with having GDPR web compliancy and no cookies, providing a visually interactive dashboard for each metric, and going into a lot of detail about each metric.
It provides simplicity, advanced analysis, and data across all time-periods, making it the best of all worlds.
Setting Up Your Analytics Tools
If you’re now sure you also need to get your hands on website analytics but are confused about how to do so, well, worry no more.
What do to do about setting up a website analytics tool?
Start by setting up your very own website analytics tool. As mentioned, there’s a wide range to choose from, but choose the factor that’s critical to your website – be it real-time, data comprehensiveness, or data privacy (although Tracboxx does provide a mix of all of these just for you!).
Once you have chosen your tool, start by creating your account and obtain your tracking code which needs to be integrated with your website.
Once the code is integrated into the website and you have figured out the initial steps, it is then time to configure your settings and dive into the nitty-gritty of what you want to track.
Integration with Perfection
Well, you might be a bit confused about how to do the integration seamlessly. Well, worry no more. Follow these tips to get the easiest and smoothest integration without going through any hassle.
- Working with your developer: Start by working with your developer and use their help in integrating the code for you.
- Placement: It is essential to make sure you are adding the code in the head of your website’s code, which will allow it to be a part of all your workings and pages.
- Testing it out: Ensure that you test the code once it is integrated to see if it’s working perfectly and capturing the data that is crucial to you.
Data Collection is done seamlessly
Once you have integrated the code with your website, your next worry is that data collection is done without any difficulty. For this, make sure that your website URL matches with the one in your analytics tool.
Alongside this, also make sure you’re working with the correct time zone and setting the right filters to not skew the data in any way.
A Journey: Data to Decisions
Data to insights
Website analysis has now opened the doors for you to turn all the random data that you used to work with and convert this into actionable insights. These insights will help you see the trends in your data and allow you to understand what the visitor feels when they visit your website.
It will give you a comprehensive idea of the engagement patterns, the impact a campaign has on the users, and what channels are not garnering any visitors.
These insights, when analyzed, can be used to make critical decisions. These decisions can include which channel you would like to use such as referral websites, social media or search engines to rank your website or its URL.
Whether the visitors are engaging because of the colors, font, font size and images used on your website and the ease of navigation.
Insights to decisions
So that now you have identified the areas for improvement and all the trends, how do you go about that?
Well, start by prioritizing your goals. Ensure that you are working with the perspective that your ROI is the most important. Next, set a timeline to make sure all your goals are aligned. This helps you stay on track and measure effectiveness for goals.
Lastly, once you have made a change, track your changes, and see if any metric has changed - and if so, is it a good change?
How to keep the analytics up to date
After you have fulfilled the data to decisions journey, it is important to look ahead and make sure that you take measures to ensure that your analytics keep giving you essential insights. Some ways to do so are:
- Software updates: most analytics offer automatic updates, but it is still important to check for any new updates in the software and be up to date with the latest features.
- Exploring new features: Website analytics has a lot of potential, so it is important to not get stuck in a few metrics, but rather make sure to delve deeper and get even better and deeper insights.
The crux
Well, within this article, we discussed how it is important to not drown in a sea of data, but rather make informed decisions using it.
However, making these decisions becomes so much easier with website analytics, that allow you to track visitor numbers, page views, live visitors, and bounce rates.
Once you are clear on how critical website analytics is, it's only fair to decide the best tool for yourself, that will allow you to get insights without compromising on safety and advanced features.
From there on, you just must set up the data, integrate the codes, ensure data is being captured and well, you’re good to go.
The decision is in your hands
The power is all yours! It is your call if you want to take the next step and unleash the potential of website analytics or are you okay with being left overwhelmed with low engagement pages and a ton of data you can’t understand – choose wisely. Your website is on the line.
