How can businesses benefit from using analytics on their website?
The answer usually has to be selected from several options:
- It will show you where your audience comes from
- It will list which pages your audience does not like
- It will show where your customers go after they’ve left your site
- It will show you why your audience visit your site
Answer: It will show you where your audience comes from
Were you able to get this answer correct? Don’t worry if you are stuck or confused, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide to website analytics to help you to understand why this was the correct answer, as well as why the other answers were incorrect.
What are website analytics?
Web analytics is the study of the behavior of visitors to your website. Website analytics using Google Analytics involves the tracking, analyzing and reporting of important website metric data, split into the following main categories:
- Audience
- Acquisition
- Behavior
- Conversions
- Attribution
- Realtime
Audience
The Audience section of Google Analytics provides detailed information about the users of a website. There are specific subcategories that cover personal attributes such as demographics, interests, geography and behavior, which are useful for customer profiling and market research.
Additional subcategories include technology and device, which provides information on what hardware and software was used to access your website. This can provide useful guidance when deciding on how best to optimize your website for responsive designs, as you can prioritize the types of devices and browsers most commonly used by your website visitors.
Acquisition
The acquisition section of Google Analytics focuses on where the website visitors came from. The different subcategories of the acquisition category include but are not limited to:
- Google Ads
- Search Console
- Social
- Campaigns
Google Ads and Search Console are both offer website tools provided by Google that assist businesses in analyzing the results and performance of their website. One major source of acquisition traffic for most websites is high authority backlinks from other websites that pass high referral traffic across.
The Acquisition category often displays results in terms of direct traffic that has come from users entering the URL, organic search traffic that covers clicks from the search engine results pages, and referral traffic which is the traffic generated from users clicking on links on other websites.
Behavior
The behavior tab of Google Analytics displays the data that covers how users have interacted with your website content. Using this information, webmasters can start to understand which pieces of content are proving popular, as well as identifying areas which need improvement. The behavior category provides capabilities for businesses to compare page views against other key metrics such as average time on page or the percentage of users who exited the site from this page. The subcategories of the behavior category are:
- Behavior Flow
- Site Content
- Site Speed
- Site Search
- Events
- Publisher
- Experiments
Conversions
Tracking the conversions is one of the primary ways businesses can benefit from using analytics as it helps businesses to understand which pages and pieces of content are delivering key business results such as sales, sign-ups or subscriptions. In the context of website analytics, conversions are an event where a user has completed a desired action. On Google Analytics, businesses can set up conversion monitoring using the goals, ecommerce and multi-channel function subcategories.
Attribution
At time of writing, the attribution section of Google Analytics is still in beta mode. Attribution is set to deliver a free, cross-channel attribution model that allows users to report and analyze digital results from across all channels, helping to better attribute conversion based results to specific touch points within a marketing funnel.
At present, there are two types of attribution model available to choose from: rules-based attribution models and data-driven attribution models. The rules-based models follow fixed precedents for assigning conversions, and include first click, last click, linear, time decay and position based attribution models. The data-driven models are unique to each advertiser and distribute attribution for a conversion based on observed and learned behavior powered by machine learning algorithms.
Realtime
The realtime section of Google Analytics provides information on users who are currently using the site. This is a useful section of analytics for businesses who need to track results at any specific given moment in time, such as businesses understanding the impact of a newly launched advertising campaign. Within the realtime category, businesses can track:
- Overview
- Locations
- Traffic Sources
- Content
- Events
- Conversions
Getting the most out of website analytics
The sheer array of website metrics and data sources that can be collected and analyzed can appear daunting, especially to beginners in digital marketing. However, fear not! Owing to the popularity of Google Analytics and other digital marketing analytics tools such as SemRush, there are numerous detailed training guides, videos and courses available that will explain what all the tools do, and how you can set out to get the most out of these tools for your website and business.
