Web Analytics: A Crucial Part of Your Marketing
In today’s digital world, your website is where the first contact with your potential customers happens. It’s a place where they have a chance to get to know your business, read about your story and your values and learn more about your products and services. These potential customers act and behave in a certain way on your website and you should definitely know more about them and their behavior.
Why Web Analytics?
Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of your website’s visitors. Using a variety set of analytics tools allows us to follow the visitor on his journey throughout the website, monitor his behavior on every subpage, keep track of where he clicks and on which pages he spends the most time. We can even get information about the lives of our visitors: information about which country they are from, demographics (age and gender), the devices they use the most often when visiting our website, what their interests are and many more.
Based on the data we have gathered, we can tailor and adjust the website to our customers and keep track of purchases of each individual customer or specific customer groups. We can also predict the products customers are most likely to purchase in the near future.
Which Are The Most Important Metrics To Track?
Different tools can provide us lots of data and allow us to track many metrics. Performing a detailed analysis can be relatively time-consuming and requires a lot of concentration. It can be really overwhelming. But don’t worry. If don’t have much time, but still want to have a summary of how visitors behave on your website or whether there are any “hurdles” throughout their journey, you should keep track of these primary metrics:
Overall traffic of your website
When we talk about the website’s traffic, we mean the number of website’s visits over a period of time. This number is quite significant, because it reveals whether your website receives the attention it deserves.
For example, having 50 visitors a day can be considered a low number if your website has been around a year or two. On the other hand, it’s a quite decent number if your site has launched just a week ago. In other words, it’s necessary to keep track of the traffic of your website, but it’s more important to monitor how it evolves and expands over time. Ideally, you want your numbers to grow as your website gets older.
Bounce rate
If someone visits your website and leaves without viewing other pages, we say the visitor “bounced” (single-page session). Bounce rate is the number of single-page sessions divided by all sessions on your website.
The most common causes of high bounce rate are:
━ Long loading time
━ Clumsy navigation structure of the website
━ Unattractive web design
The average bounce rate of most websites is between 20 to 70 percent. Naturally, the lower the number the better. If your bounce rate is higher than 30%, you should think about the possible causes, analyze them and take action.
Traffic sources
In most cases, new visitors come to your website by clicking on links, instead of entering the specific URL to their web browser. Pages that link to your website are sources of traffic. Typically, we’re speaking about:
━ Search engines
━ Links from other websites
━ Traffic from email campaigns
━ Links from social media
Web analytics tools can help you to easily monitor your traffic sources and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you’re not getting enough traffic from search engines, it can be an indicator that you need to rethink your keyword strategy.
Desktop vs mobile
You can find a plethora of sources on the Internet saying that mobile phones are the most used devices these days and that the vast majority of visitors browse your website on their smartphone. So, every website should be now fully optimized for mobile devices. If data shows you that a higher percentage of visitors are coming through their smartphones, offer them even better user experience. Play with each element and web content and create a personalized web content fro your mobile customers.
New vs returning visitors
At this point, it mostly depends on the type of business you run, but in general, returning visitors are the best ones (this is very important especially for online stores). Ideally, it is recommended to achieve a rate of return, i.e. number of returning visitors, around 30% at least.
„Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.“
- Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web
How Do We Analyze a Website?
Among many of our completed projects, you can also find those where we worked on redesigning an old website. During our first meetings with the client, we always go through their ideas and requirements to find out why they have decided to invest in a new website, whether they want to focus on upgrading its design or on increasing the functionality of the website.
Next, we analyze the current website, map out its visitors and their behavior. Based on our analysis then we can come up with a new website which is tailored to their behavior and needs. But we don’t stop there. We also examine the competitive environment in order to understand the visitor, his experience on the websites of competitors and interpret the information that are provided to him.
There are several pieces of the puzzle that need to come together. Nowadays, you have to have a nice design to wow your visitors, but a simple and straightforward navigation that guides them throughout your website is just as much important. You can invest a lot of time, energy and finances into having a beautiful and modern website full of interesting animations. However, it won’t bring you any success unless your website guides your visitors where they want to be and where you want them to be. Let’s say you want to provide information for your visitors to learn more about your services. At the end of their journey, you want them to fill out a contact form. In order to do so, you need to guide them along this path to complete your desired action. If your visitors get lost on the way and don’t reach to the final page, all your efforts of having an appealing design were pointless.
Example of a website developed by us for the J&T REAL ESTATE company:
From Analysis to Design
After we’re done with analyzing the current website, next comes the redesign phase, where we devise the new UX/UI design. We take into consideration the overall “image” of the company. It’s important to preserve this image of the firm, so the visitor won’t have a feeling that he’s visiting a different business. We need to ensure him that he came to the company’s website he already knows – a modern company which is constantly growing and moving forward.
The design of the website is followed by user testing, i.e. testing the website by real visitors. They are the ones who can judge the experience of the new website the best. It can easily happen that we come up with a perfect design and a simple navigation, but when a real visitor comes to the website, our solution can be confusing to him, which will result in leaving the site within a few seconds without completing a desired action. This is why user testing is essential.
After testing and finalizing the entire web design, the last step is its implementation and deployment.
Read also: What is Customer Experience and why you should focus on it when designing digital products?
Do you think your company’s website needs redesigning? Don’t hesitate and contact us at hi@touch4it.com. The first consultation with our specialists is always free.
