What do Website Analytics allow you to do ?
What do Website Analytics allow you to do ?
Having a website and getting desirable response isn’t an easy task. You need to have a record of things you do, track your audience and then customise your website according to their behaviour.
That’s what website analytics allow you to do.
It is backbone of everything you do online. It helps you in measuring, collecting, analyzing and reporting the data of your website, which helps you to improve the effectiveness of whatever you do online.
It can be a little complicated for beginners but in short web analytics allow you to learn about the activity and behavior of audience on a website.
For example: number of users visited, for how long did they stay, pages they visited, and whether they are arriving by following a link or not.
You can also know that if someone was on the page earlier or even who they are!
Also Read : How To Install Google Analytics On WordPress
You can take decisions on the analytical reports and go on doing continuous improvement to drive more and more traffic.
Before jumping on the topic let’s first understand what is website analytics in very simple terms.
What is Website Analytics?
Website Analytics as it sounds is complete analysis of your website or web page. You get to know the performance of the website and how the visitors are reacting to it.
It provides insights and data that can be used to create a better user experience for website visitors.
Whenever a visitor reaches your site, the web server records this interaction. This data is then processed by Web Analytics software and detailed reports and charts are produced.
This software is commonly available in web-based applications and one of the most popular web analytics tool is Google Analytics, which allows you to see what’s going on with your website through cold hard data.
Also Read : How To Install Google Analytics On WordPress
What do Web Analytics allow you to do?
With the help of web analytics you can get to know the total traffic, source of the traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate which in exact figures.
These are some of the key metrics that help you know about your audience and their response to your site.
It’s kind of a survey that web analytics tool do on your website, and then represent the report so that you can work better and improve things that are a hurdle in your website’s growth.
Data representated by these tools can be categorised in follow ways-
Audience Data:
• Number of visitors and number of unique visitors who reached your website as it’ll let you know about the traffic you are getting on the website
• You also get the ratio between New vs Returning visitors.
• Countries from which they belong
• Which browsers they use like chrome or even the device (mobile or laptop) they are using for reaching your website
Also Read : First Step in SEO Process for the Website
Audience Behaviour:
- Time Duration- You can have a look on how much time your visitors are spending per visit.
- Common landing and exit pages — Landing page is the entry point to your website. It tell us about how visitors land on the website.
- Exit page is the last page user accesses to before they leave the site.
- Number of pages per visits and most frequently visited pages of your website.
Website Analytics Tools
In order to understand the data, track records of the website and monitor the activities you’ll need to install complicated softwares which is a lot of work.
But now there are so many analytics tools available to take care of all the heavy task.
Some of the best analytics tools are:
Let’s understand the working and components of one of the most popular web analytics tool amongst website owners.
Also Read : 7 Tips to Pick the Best Hosting Provider
Google Analytics
It is one of the best free tools that can be used to track and analyse data about web traffic.
Website activities like session duration, pages per session, bounce rate along with the source of the traffic can be traced easily.
To use these tools effectively and improve the results you need to know the basic terms used in the data produced by these softwares.
Some of them are mentioned below-
New Users
When a person visits your site the very first time, a Google Analytics cookie will be set and a unique identifier will be assigned to them. That visitor will be counted as “new user”
Users
In Google Analytics terms, users represent the number of new and returning visitors of your site.
This is the actual figure of people landing on your website, it means that if someone visits your site 100 times on the same device or browser, they would still only count as one user.
These repeated single users are termed as “Returning User”.
However, the number of new users are not always realiable because there are chances that same person can still be counted as a new user even though they have visited your site before.
- If a user uses multiple device(smartphone, laptop) to visit your website , Google analytics will count each device as a new user.
- If the visitor uses multiple browsers on same device to load the content of the site then GA will assign them a new client id.
- Also, if the user clears their cookies and then re-visit the site, the visitor will appear as “new user”
Also Read : How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog / Website
Sessions
It is the period of time a user is engaged on your site. A new session starts after 30 mins of inactivity or after midnight.
Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will still be counted as the part of original session.
Number of sessions per user
It is the average number of sessions per user or visitor.
Page views
It is record of total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are also taken in account.
Whenever a visitor hits the back or refresh button, a new pageview is recorded. Increasing pageviews reflects the increasing traffic, hence a good thing.
Bounce Rate
In online businesses, a bounce is when a visitor leaves the page before clicking on any another page within your site during that session.
Lesser the bounce rate, better the website’s performance and the opposite.
If your bounce rate is 80% then it means 4 out of every 5 people that come to your website don’t care to stay long and explore more.
Average time on page
It gives the average time spent on a single page by all the users of the website.
If you want to learn more about ” How to install Google Analytics” do click the link below and quickly install Google Analytics in few steps and track your website performance to simplify the data analysis.
Also Read : How to Install WordPress in 3 Simple Steps
Hope you enjoyed reading this article about What do Website Analytics allow you to do ?
For any further queries or suggestions you can write down to us below or contact us here.
