Branding Features You Need
Make smarter decisions with website analytics
Gain valuable insights about your visitors wherever they come from. Learn about your market by tracking user behaviour, website traffic and revenue reports.
What are website analytics and why they're indispensable
When you’re running a business, understanding your customers is instrumental to success. Perhaps your sales are doing well, your customer service is on point and your reputation is great – but without properly understanding who you’re selling to and why they pick you, your business is merely a gambling machine with which you’re running on luck. When you can understand every intricate detail regarding your customers, not only do you learn how to retain them, but it also gives you the opportunity to target new customers in the future using the details you gathered in the past.
The backbone to all business success is the art of persuasion. It is a business’s capacity to understand its customer’s fears and desires that dictates how it will respond to those very emotions that brought them there in the first place. Unfortunately, for so many businesses, understanding their customers is a game that has long gone unfulfilled. Aside from basic observation, so many businesses have no way of measuring who their customers are and why they come to them in the first place. Consequently, so many business decisions are not predicated on formal data but arbitrary choice – leading to losses in sales, reputation and footfall.
When you start your own website, you gain access to website analytics, and all these problems can be disposed of. Website analytics represent the collection and analysis of data regarding your website and its viewers. Analytics help answer some of the basic questions about your visitors behaviour such as where they are coming from, which pages are most popular, what your conversion rate is, as well as user demographics such as the age, gender and even the interests of your users.
Understand your visitors with detail
Website analytics dont just collect numerical data, when you connect a service like Google Analytics to your website, you gain access to qualitative information about your customers. This includes the age and gender of your viewers, which country and town they’re coming from, what devices they use, which posts of yours are most popular, where your viewers engage the most on your website, what percentage of your viewers convert into customers, and what interests they have.
When you understand your visitors, you can make data based decisions towards your business. Instead of relying on arbitrary guesses of who you’re selling to, you now know a clear image of what kind of people are most interested in your offer. Consequently when you know who you’re attracting, writing higher converting posts and creating successful products invariably becomes an easier task.
For example, you may run your analytics to learn that the majority of your viewers are women based in southern England with interests in childcare and children’s toys. If this is new to you, you could retarget your social media ads specifically towards women in southern England who are mothers. Only this time, you know the people coming to your website will already be much more likely to buy, and with less gambling you can expect a much higher conversion rate.
Learn how people get to your website
When you set up website analytics, a crucial piece of data to learn is how people get to your website. Visiting a website doesn’t come without reason. When people click your pages, its either because they’ve found it when searching google for a topic, been referred by a friend, seen a link on social media or because they’ve directly searched your address. Whatever the case, knowing how people get to your site can say a lot about how you are attracting your customers.
If the majority of your visitors are coming from referrals – meaning a friend has shared the link with them, you can be sure your page has something of value. If on the contrary your referral rates are too low, it could be a sign you need to make your content more engaging, and thus more likely of being shared. Perhaps most of your visitors are coming from search engines, in that case knowing the value in your search engine optimisation would be a predominant tool for success.
Seeing your largest traffic sources notifies you on how you can optimise your business to make the most of its greatest assets, and which parts are underperforming. Knowing how people came to your website can also be used as a measurement for your marketing success. If you’ve spent £350 on Facebook marketing to learn that you’ve had a 70% spike in clicks from Facebook, then your campaign has done well. If, however, your analytics show that just 1 in 1000 of those clicks converted into customers, then you’ve got a serious indicator to reevaluate your campaign.
view how much traffic you're getting
One of the most important statistics any website can collect is its traffic. Traffic refers to how many visitors a website is getting within a given time frame, as well as to which pages and for how long. Knowing your traffic gives you a clear understanding of how many people are reaching your website and thus how many you can expect to see in the future.
If you want to understand the success of your website, reading your traffic as trends on graphs is a must do. Platforms like Google Analytics make it easy to compare your traffic over time, across days, weeks, months and years, and across pages. Having a visual graph representing your traffic is a great way to determine if your website is increasing in views (thus being successful), or whether its going downhill. If in the month of May you attained 2500 visitors, and in June it increased to 3000, then you’ve got yourself a 20% increase in views, and, if you’re a business, most likely also in sales.
Lets say you’ve just opened a local restaurant, and, as part of your marketing efforts you started a website for it. Checking your traffic at this point is a great way to see how interested locals are by your presence. If your traffic is gradually increasing, this is a great sign that your brand presence is gaining momentum, but, if your traffic spikes and then suddenly plummets and remains low then you’ve got a clear indicator that people have checked you out and simply aren’t interested in your business.
Learn which content is most engaging
If you’re serious about attracting more visitors to your website, knowing which content is most engaging is instrumental to creating more content with the same effect. With website analytics you can see which pages are most viewed, and more importantly for how long compared to others. When you can see that posts written in one style are outcompeting those in a secondary style, seeing which type of post readers prefer becomes axiomatic.
Having a website is great, but if you’re not dedicated to creating engaging content then users aren’t going to be interested in the first place. What makes a post or page interesting can come down to many things – it could be the style of your title, the length of your paragraphs, the category of your posts, your choice of images; whatever the case, using analytics helps direct you to the content which is viewed the longest. When you can pin that content down, you learn which styles are most engaging, and which topics are to be left out updated to better standards.
One of the most important statistics any website can know is its bounce rate. A bounce refers to when a visitor enters a website and almost immediately after leaves. This could be because the website was too confusing, it didn’t answer their question, or it was incorrectly marketed. Regardless of the reason, knowing your bounce rate gives you the perfect answer to whether or not your website is engaging enough. A good bounce rate should typically be beneath 35%, meaning at least 65% of your readers dont automatically leave when they enter.
Effectively manage your products and scale your sales
In a physical store, understanding your sales analytics can be a complicated process. Knowing your sales figures is one thing, but when your analytics are connected to a website you can learn much more intricate details which you wouldn’t traditionally find in a physical store. Many business owners for example are interested in conversion rates, a metric that tells you of all the people who enter your website, what percentage will convert into paying customers. Knowing this can help you make smarter decisions about the efficiency of your campaign.
Let’s say for example you own an online plant store. For every 95 website entries you get one sale, giving you a conversion rate of 1 in 95. If you’re spending £100 on social media marketing to attain 2000 views, that means you get 21 orders for every £100 spent on marketing. If each product averages around £20 in profit, thats £420 profit for every £100 you spent on media marketing, or, a 320% return on investment (ROI). Automatically tracking specific details like conversion rates allows you to develop a specific understanding of your business costs and projected revenues.
Another metric you want to know as a business owner is how many of your customers are new, and which ones are returning. When people visit your website, Google Analytics automatically tracks whether they are first time visitors or returning visitors. Knowing this gives you an understanding of two things, first of all it tells you your customer lifetime value (LTV). Your customer lifetime value is the overall worth a customer has to you over their entire relationship with the business. If your average customer will return to your business three times spending on average £100 each time, their LTV is £300.
Secondly, knowing your return rate gives you an understanding of customer perceptions towards your business. If any more than 20% of your website visitors are returning visitors, you can rest assured that your products are well regarded and likely to retain more revenue. Moreover, e-commerce analytics give you a statistical understanding of which products are outperforming others. When you learn that a minority of products are underperforming in sales, it’s a clear indicator that they should be removed or updated while you place more focus on the best sellers.
When your entire business model depends on the art of persuasion, learning about the habits of your customers is an indispensable lesson. When you understand the intricate details of your customers and how they buy, selling becomes a far more predictable game. Getting started is not hard either, with the quick setup of a professional website you can have valuable analytics running within a simple 24 hours.