Web analytics is of great importance for every website operator. This area of digital analytics helps you understand how visitors interact with your website and provides the tools to effectively adjust marketing and content strategies. Whether it's an e-commerce, an information portal, a company website, or a personal blog, web analytics provides the necessary data to achieve your goals.
Basics of Web Analytics
The analysis of websites deals with collecting and evaluating information about the behavior of visitors on your website. This includes where visitors come from, how long they stay on the website, which pages they visit, and what actions they perform. Various tools and technologies are used, from simple tracking codes to complex analytics platforms.
Why is it important to track your website with web analytics?
There are numerous reasons why it is essential to track your website using web analytics. Here are the main ones:
Analysis of user behavior
The ability to analyze user behavior is the main reason why website analytics is important. Without knowing what users do on your website, it is impossible to improve the website.
A web analytics platform can show you how users move around your website, which links they click on, and which forms they fill out.
Improve user experience on your website
Web analytics is a great way to identify issues and areas where your website can be optimized. For example, you can check the exit pages of your website to find out why so many users leave the site when they visit one of these pages and how to fix this.
You can also gather information about your users' preferences to improve the user experience in the future. They may always click on a certain type of button or prefer the design of one page over another.
In any case, you can use this data to make your website more user-friendly and increase conversion rates.
Enhance marketing activities
Web analytics is one of the most effective methods for understanding and improving your marketing efforts.
A good platform can collect important data about your marketing campaigns, such as:
With this information, you can decide which marketing campaigns bring the best users to your website and achieve the highest ROI.
Make well-informed decisions
In essence, web analytics facilitates decision-making for your website and marketing strategies, as it is based on concrete data rather than assumptions.
Instead of wondering why users don't add products to their shopping cart, don't sign up for the newsletter, or don't read a blog post, you can analyze their behavior and make hypotheses based on this information to improve the conversion rate. Web analytics even provides you with the data to determine if you are right or wrong.
What are the most significant metrics to keep an eye on?
To familiarize yourself with web analytics, it is important to know the key metrics to monitor. The following introduces seven significant metrics and explains how to track them using Trustlytics.
Traffic
Traffic is the number of visitors to your website over a specific period of time. It is the backbone of your website because the more visits your website receives, the more revenue or success it can generate.
However, a high number of visitors alone is not a guarantee of high revenues or success. To be successful, you should focus on attracting your ideal customers or visitors and generating high-quality traffic from those who are most likely to be interested in your offering.
Ideally, you should see an increase in visitor numbers over time. The longer your website is online and the more high-quality and targeted content you create, the more traffic you should receive.
Trustlytics offers various means to check the traffic on your website:
Trustlytics' visits log report is particularly helpful if you want to gain detailed insights into your visitors.
The report shows you all visits and provides a detailed overview of each visitor, including:
Traffic channels
Traffic channels provide information on how visitors reach your website. There are different types of traffic channels, such as search engines, emails, and direct visits.
Trustlytics distinguishes five standard types of traffic channels:
However, each of these channels can be further analyzed. Let's consider natural search engine traffic, for example:
Trustlytics tracks visits from each search engine and shows you the total visits, actions performed by these visitors, and the average time they spend on your website.
Pageviews
Each time a browser loads a page, it is recorded as a pageview by your web analytics tool. The term "pageview" refers to the number of individual accesses to a page on your website.
In Trustlytics, you can view the pageviews in the "Pages" report.
In this report, you can quickly see the most visited pages of your website.
Be careful not to attach too much importance to pageviews. Just because a page has many views does not necessarily mean it is of high quality or value. There are several reasons for this. First, the page may be confusing, causing visitors to have to revisit it multiple times to understand the content. Second, it may be the default page that most visitors land on when they enter your website, such as the homepage.
While pageviews provide insights, it is crucial to analyze user behavior and other metrics more closely to truly assess the relevance and impact of a page.
Average time on page
The average time spent on a page indicates how much time, on average, visitors spend there. You can find this information in the "Pages" report in Trustlytics.
A low value for average time on page is not necessarily negative. A short time spent on checkout pages, especially if visitors successfully complete their transactions, indicates that the checkout process is simple and smooth. On the other hand, a longer time spent on blog posts is a good sign. This suggests that readers are thoroughly engaging with the content.
And don't forget: visitors naturally spend less time on entry and exit pages.
Visitor profile
In the visitor profile, you have all the details about a visitor at a glance.
While other analytics tools distribute visitor information across various menu items, Trustlytics allows you to learn everything about each individual visitor in the visitor profile report.
This report provides a comprehensive overview of a visitor's activities, including:
With the visitor profile, it is possible to analyze in detail if, for example, a social media post about your German blog post attracts the right visitors and whether they actually read it. It can even be determined if the visitors did not read the post and what they did instead. Based on this information, you can draw conclusions about whether the social media post was not optimal or if another blog post interests the visitors more.
It always depends on the context – different websites have different goals, and it is important to consider this when analyzing your website.
Conversions
A conversion means that a user performs a desired action on your website. This can be:
Practically any action can be tracked as a conversion in Trustlytics by setting goals and analyzing the goal report.
As shown in the screenshot above, Trustlytics displays the development of your conversions over time. Additionally, you can monitor your conversion rate to get a comprehensive picture. Each conversion can also be assigned a value to calculate how much revenue each conversion generates.
Bounce rate
A visitor leaves your website without taking any action or visiting another page.
It is advisable to aim for a low bounce rate, as this indicates that visitors are engaging with your website and are more likely to convert. However, in some cases, a high bounce rate can also be positive. It may indicate that visitors found what they were looking for on the first page and did not need to search further.
The significance of the bounce rate depends on the goals and purpose of your website.
You can view the bounce rate of your website in the "Pages" report in Trustlytics – the same report that also displays pageviews.
In the second part of the introduction to web analytics: a comprehensive guide for beginners, we will explore best practices in web analytics.