How can a business benefit from using analytics on their website?

Web analytics has become a necessary tool for businesses to monitor their website performance. A business benefit from using analytics is knowing how users are interacting with their website, for instance, what products they checked on your website.

Businesses benefit from using analytics in a number of ways. The most important one is measuring the success of marketing and advertising campaigns. Analytics tools help determine how much traffic you derived from the campaign and how many leads it has created. Businesses like B2B marketplaces, advertising agencies and marketing companies use this tool to review and track the performance of products being sold and campaigns.

What is web analytics?

In layman terms, analysing the behavior of visitors to a website is website analytics. This includes tracking and reviewing the data on how the visitors used the components of the website including webpages, images and videos.

The data collected by analytics tools include traffic sources, referring sites, page views, paths taken and conversion rates. There are multiple business objectives that can be leveraged using analytics including:

• Predict which products customers are expected to buy the most and the least
• Track money spent by groups of customers or individual customers on the products
• Analyse whether a customer is likely to buy a particular product again
• Personalise the website for customers who visit the website frequently
• Identify the regions where most/least customers visit the website

For example, imagine your business helps small businesses go digital with a variety of software products. You launched a marketing campaign on MSME day and promoted your offerings. To gauge how this activity performed you will login to your web analytics software and check data which will be given in graphs and figures.

Types of web analytics

There are two types of web analytics:

• Off-site analytics

Monitoring visitor activity outside the website is called off-site analytics. Outside the website means an organisations looks at data collected from companies’ social media pages, search engines and forums. This will help you compare the performance of your company with that of your competitors.

• On-site analytics

On-site web analytics refers to tracking the activity of visitors on your website to see how the site is performing. The data gathered includes details on site engagement, most popular content, etc.

Business benefits of using web analytics

Now that we have learned what web analytics is the obvious question would be ‘how can businesses benefit from using analytics on their website?’. There are several ways in which web analytics helps boost sales and business growth:

• Get to know your visitors

The primary data you collect from the analytics tool is visitor behaviour. These are the insights you can derive from the data:

• The number of visitors on your website at any point of time
• The geographical location of the visitors
• The pages, images and videos they are viewing on the website
• The amount of time a visitor is spending on the website

 

The analytics will track how organic and paid traffic has been developing over time. Analysing this data will help a business identify which products contribute most of the revenue. This a major business benefit from analytics as it helps businesses create a more concentrated effort for targeted campaigns to get more leads.

You can even check the bounce rate on your website. Bounce rate refers to the number of times users have left the website without interacting with it. A high bounce rate points to the fact that the users didn’t feel that content matched their search query, or it could be that your website has weak user experience.

• Find the right target audience

Web analytics tools help you filter your data according to geography, gender, age, device they are viewing the webpage on, etc. This will help you pinpoint the audience that is showing interest in your products. Using this data, you can create targeted marketing campaigns which will attract potential customers to your website.

For example, Google analytics, a well-known web analytics tool from Google, features an Affinity Category. This gives you a percentage breakdown of specific audience’s interests, including news and politics, banking and finance, media and entertainment, Do-It-Yourselfers, etc. Affinity data helps you to know your audience better which allows you to tailor web content to fit their needs.

• Track the performance of social media marketing campaigns

Your web analytics software will give you detailed metrics on how your campaign is performing. With the tool you will be able to:

• Identify the social media platforms that contributed to most traffic
• Identify which content worked best
• Calculate the ROI of the social media campaign
• Calculate how many leads your business got as a result of the campaign
• Optimise website and web services according to customer preferences

A major business benefit from using analytics is that the data provided by the tool can be used for analysing customer behaviour. Tracking the path a user takes while visiting the website will show how a particular user interacts with your webpages.

This data can be used to determine which pages interest the customers the most and help you identify potential areas for improvement in user experience. Thus, the analysis will provide insights into individual customer preferences which can be used to restructure the website content for a more personalised experience. Good user experience brings increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Improve conversion rates

Once you gain information on your visitors you can tailor webpages according to customer preferences. This will generate more leads and contribute to customer conversions. Data sets will interpret how users interact with your website and map the conversion path. This insight will help you to optimise the conversion path, so the user journey becomes smoother.

Web analytics has become a necessary tool for modern day businesses. This tool is essential to measure the performance of your website and find out the number of leads generated through it. It is crucial to analyse the data from the analytics tool to achieve key business targets and foster business communication for better results.