Key Website Analytics Tools for Business

What is Website Analytics?

Analytics are extremely insightful tools that are available for you to use to improve your business by attracting new customers, improving your website experience, learning more about your customers, and so much more.

Website analytics, simply put, is a way of collecting the data coming from your website. Everything from how many visitors you have, where they come from, what type of content they react well to and so on and so forth.

5 most common analytic tools that’ll help take your business to the next level:

Website Traffic

This is how many customers you have coming in and out of your website. It’s important to know, especially when you’re looking at how long you’ve had your website up for. This can be seen from the visitor’s country, language, and so much more!

Say it’s been a year and you’re only getting 75 people coming and going from your website? Well, that’s quite low but say you’ve been up only for 3 weeks and getting 75 people?

That’s a decent amount. Website traffic is in regards to the amount of people due to the length of time or age of the website. Ideally, you’d want your number of visits to grow as your website age gets higher.

Traffic Sources

Now don’t get confused here, we’re still talking on the movement, but not what you think. Usually, first-time visitors find your website from any links you have, rather than typing in your full URL. Your traffic sources, are those links and we have broken them down into four categories:

• Search engines
• Links from other sites
• Visits from email campaigns
• Links from social media

Device Type

We’ve seen how far technology has spread and grown over the past 25 years alone. Now you can open any URL on your phone or iPad or any device you have!

With analytics tools, you can track what percentage of users are visiting your site through desktop or mobile browsers. Currently, 51.3% of web pages are being loaded on mobile devices.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate would be when someone visits your website and then leaving without looking at any second pages/links or CTAs. This is why it’s called ‘bounce’. This can be calculated by the percentage you get overall of your traffic.

Many sites have bounce rates for a couple of reasons, such as:

• Long loading times
• A clunky navigation scheme
• An unattractive web design

Of course, this is dependent on what content your website is offering. However, on average, 20-70% is the number many websites are facing. Anything higher than 30% is cause for concern.

Visitor Type

In all honesty to get to the next level, you want to keep retaining your visitors and how many times they come back to your websites. This set of people/customers or even visitors could be called your core audience! These are the ones who you should keep an eye on to not only bring up the number but make sure to nurture them and build a rapport with.

Of course, your core audience is dependent on your site and what you’re offering, however on average you should be looking at a 30% return rate. Anything lower than that could mean your site is not as engaging as you’d need it to be.

How can these benefit your business?

In order to get to the next level, you’ll need an effective analysis of analytics. This can make all the difference between running a highly trafficked website with a great conversion rate, and a site that is forever in a vicious cycle to remain stagnant. Below, we’ve come up with a couple of key points that we believe will change your analytics forever!

Key 1: Know your target audience

Don’t let a couple nice reviews leave you to think that’s all who read and see your site…The best thing about web analytics is, it’ll help you create and find the right target audiences.

Your target audience gives you more info than you’ll ever need really! Here’s where you’ll find what your niche actually expects from your site.

Finding the audience will help you create marketing materials that leave a warm smile on your customers faces. The right marketing campaigns to the right audiences will make conversions, and take your website to the next level.

Key 2: Leverage where your target audience is from

It’s imperative that we use the Pareto Principle. For any who don’t know this principle, it’s simply the 80/20 rule! So roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.

So does that have to do with your web analytics? It’s too easy: you identify your top traffic sources and ensure that you are leveraging them to their maximum capacity. You’re wanting to use this info to make sure your website has their best interest at hand!

By leveraging where your audience is coming from, you’ll find visitor behavior. This can be evaluated by studying how long visitors stay on the site or specific pages.

Visitor Behavior opens your spectrum to which links were clicked or other actions taken by the visitor. Here’s why Bounce rate is so important for us to also use! High bounce rates can mean that visitors are not interested in the page content or where it leads.

Key 3: Identify issues within your website

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Clear the junk out. Using these analytic tools properly will always include identifying any and all issues within your own website. And we’re not talking about bounce rate here either, we’re discussing exit pages.

Your goal should always be to minimize the percentage of this happening. In order to identify these, you want to do a report from time to time and look for:

• Any page intended to encourage the reader to explore your site further. A couple of examples would be your homepage, your about me page, any category pages and so on.
• Any and all pages that have an unanswered amount of high exit rate.

From there, you can compare the results against old figures to see if anything has increased on those pages. What you’ll be looking for in this report is, the number of exits-this is your main focus.

Once you have those numbers and results, think about the below issues your site may be suffering from:

• Your image files are too big. Solution: compress your image files
• Too much code/plugins. Solution: condense your coding
• Increased amount of traffic. Solution: invest in a better, higher performing server
• Not making use of caching techniques
• Too many ads

Key 4: Set goals and landmarks

Setting goals and landmarks are imperative to your business like none other. Once more, we’ve said this before but for those of you in the back-stay consistent with your goals! In hindsight, a goal really is you setting that standard for what you are expecting for your site.

To be frank, unless you are running your business purely as a hobby, you should have an ideal end result in mind every time someone hits your site. It could be a sign up to your email list, or a sale– but there should be a specific goal. Of course we as small business owners want to have a large following, but if none or barely any of those visitors are converting, we’ve gained nothing.

Now with web analytics, companies like yours can create specific goals to track. Actively measuring goals allows for your visitors to react faster to certain events through data. But don’t get too addicted to this without full knowledge of what events and or goals to track. It’d be a waste of your time to track each and every goal.

What are we saying?

Get specific in your goals and keep your eyes on these while you track. There are so many more ways that you can use analytics to take your business to the next level, like optimizing your site layout, or tracking your conversion rates.

In conclusion…

Help yourself and your business to get to the next level by ensuring you are using these and many more keys through analytics today. Get specific with your goals and watch your website traffic transform.

One more time for those who didn’t see it before, clear out any junk that’d be hindering your site within. Start doing more reports on your website and see how quickly you can decrease those visitors existing on your pages. Use the 20/80 rule so you can identify your top traffic sources and ensure that you are leveraging them to their maximum capacity.

Yes it’s possible for even your small business website that hasn’t been here long. And the best we can say is, know your target audience-get familiar with them and build your website to enhance their experience!

Hire ThePixel to build your next website!

Since our founding in 2008, we’ve created and launched many types of business websites. Over the last decade and we’ve learned a thing or two! That’s why we’re masters of our craft, let us help you build the website of your dreams – one that generates traffic, leads and conversions.

Are you ready to start? If yes, contact ThePixel and one of our representatives will guide you through the website phases and how the process works either by a Zoom Meeting or phone.