The Role of Analytics for Website Success

Having your own website is the best way to advertise your products and services as it allows your business to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. People can get to know you and your products through the website whether they are from across the street or even across the border. Websites are like brochures that are free to reproduce, interactive, and quickly distributed to people who are looking for them.

There is a lot of choice when considering what technology to use when you build your website. You can either hire a web developer or do it yourself with one of the free website builders on the market. But if you’re looking to have a website designed and want to take things to a whole new level, WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) worldwide. It is easy to use, flexible, search engine friendly and the best thing is it’s available for free!

Now, given the fact that through internet you can easily reach out to your customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors, it is important to know how your audience interact with your website. How is that possible? The answer is through ‘Website Statistics’ or ‘Website Analytics.’

In general, Web analytics is “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.” These information may be overwhelming that is why it is important to set your website goal first. Do you want to generate more sales, increase awareness or improve customer satisfaction? Setting your goal will allow you to focus your attention on the most important data.

There are many different applications that offer website analytics: for WordPress, you may install WP Statistics. It is a comprehensive plugin for your WordPress site without depending on external services and uses arrogate data whenever possible to respect your users’ privacy. You can also use Google analytic software where you can set goals (like a purchase, contact or newsletter registration) and the software will track to find which percent has achieved your goals.

So what exactly are the data that we can analyze through the collected reports or measurements of web analytics? Here are some examples and how you can use it in optimizing your website:

• Your website visitors – Website analytics will help you identify the number of the potential customers that are coming to your website, from how many of them are new or returning visitors. You can also have an overview of their demographic data such as what country they are visiting from, and classify the web browser they are using.

These information are useful especially if you’re running any kind of campaign to get people to your website. It tells you how well your search engine optimization is, plus you can use your visitor’s data to make sure that your site will be compatible with your audience.

• How your visitors utilize your website – You can track where your visitors landed on your website, how long they stayed on a page or on the entire site, which pages are the most popular, and your bounce rate or the percentage of the visitors that exit your site on the first visit.

By using these information you can improve your design and web content, and decrease the bounce rate. Analyze carefully if there is something on these pages that causes visitors to leave. You may also need to display concise information about your business so they will know that they are in the right place which will help increase the number of your page views.

• How your visitors find your website – Web analytics will help you figure out where your visitors come from; if it’s through search engines, direct links, or referral links from another site, and identify the keywords they searched to find your site.

These data will help improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and determine which among your online marketing campaign is the most effective. If you have invested in a new form of advertising such as Paid Search, you will be able to see how many visitors it has driven to your website. Is it worth the fee? Or you may want to consider having a partnership or advertise to other website that tops your referral source. There might be a unique way how your visitors find you that you don’t even know about!

Website Analytics are important as it helps you understand your audience’s behavior which is the key to optimizing your website, improving search results and attaining your website goal. Once these data are interpreted and when changes are applied correctly, you can expect great improvements to the performance of your website which will have a great impact not just on the success of your website but to your business as a whole.

About the author

Jemarie Camba

Jem fell in love with writing when she was in High School. She studied Communication Research at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, and decided to take a career in Sales and Marketing. She's currently a work-from-home Mom who spend most of her spare time watching and singing nursery rhymes with her husband and adorable baby boy.