Beginner's Guide to Website Analytics

What exactly is web analytics?

Internet analytics tools provide a sea of data. They can be used to measure progress towards the goals set. However, it’s worth customizing your analysis to keep track of the things that matter. It’s about being able to make findings of your business based on the data we collect from your site. There are many online analytics tools and they can do a lot of things.

So web analytics provides data. Some metrics can relate to countable things, such as the number of individual visitors or time spent on the site. If you are selling on your site, you can use metrics to track how much you earn and how much you sell. If it’s important to read the webpage, you can observe how much time visitors spent reading your blog posts, or how much they were on the page. These numbers are all indicators.

The best known analytical indicators are:

• Visits: This shows the number of times a website was viewed in a given time interval. It does not take into account visitor types or how often a visitor visited the page.
• Unique visitor: In this metric, each unique visitor counts once, even if they visit the website multiple times. The website identifies unique visitors based on the cookies used on your computer.
• Session: A session involves interactions that take place on a website within a specific time frame. A session can include multiple pageviews, events, social interactions, or even conversions.
• Pageviews: This metric shows the total number of (sub)pages viewed on a webpage. For example, if a visitor visited the page five times but viewed ten pages each time, it will count to fifty in this metric. If you are interested in the average number of visits per page, the number of page views should be divided by the number of visits.
• Average time on site: How much time a visitor spends visiting the website. The average can be obtained by dividing the total time spent on the website by the number of visits.
• New or returning visitors: This metric shows the proportion of new and returning visitors. As the number of unique visitors, web analytics software uses cookies to determine the number of unique visitors. When a visitor first arrives at the website, the site places a cookie on its machine, and on subsequent visits, it will be a returning visitor until the cookie expires (usually two years).

To analyze the indicators, we use so-called dimensions, which represent another type of data. When you first use web analytics, it feels like you’re immersed in a sea of ​​metrics, but you’ll soon feel like you’re navigating between data. Metrics provide quantifiable information, such as the time spent on a page or the number of pages viewed. A conversion is a piece of data that shows how many people have taken the desired action on your sites, such as a purchase or newsletter subscription. A dimension is a grouping unit from which a report can be generated, such as the type of device used or its location.

By web analytics, we mean the collection, measurement, and reporting of data generated during the use of the Internet. The purpose of data collection is to understand people who use the Internet and to tailor web content to expectations. Analytics also help examine the return on online marketing. Due to the limitations of online analysis, web analytics has now become an extremely complex field, encompassing the methodology of data analysis, the way the results are communicated, and the IT aspects of data generation.

The four main traffic sources are:

1. Organic Search: Visitors coming from search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)
2. Referral: Web traffic from another website
3. Direct: A user types the exact domain URL into their computer browser
4. Social: Website traffic coming from social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Each company needs to complete a total of five tasks before starting online data analysis. First, the business goals must be fixed, and then the tactics and strategies leading to the achievement of the goals must be selected. You can then select the most important metrics to measure your successful online activity. Finally, you can select relevant segmentation options and set goals to reach.

Before analyzing website data, it is necessary to record why the analysis is needed and what is the purpose of introducing web analytics technologies? Just as there is always a reason for the existence of websites available on the Internet, the analysis of data is always tailored to the purpose of the site. Data analysis should also contribute to the development of user interfaces (web pages, web shops) as well as to the optimization of marketing spending. And clarifying the goal determines what is worth measuring.

Web pages’ business goals and strategies

Nearly every website on the Internet can be classified into five categories based on the purpose of the website:

• Direct sales: There you can purchase goods and services, choose from delivery options, and have built-in payment solutions.
• Lead generators: Many companies are unable to sell their services directly online: for example, the work of a marketing agency or a building services engineering firm is so unique that they have to make a quote before each job. These companies mostly use their websites to generate leads, so they offer quote forms, a newsletter subscription option, free sample products to reach potential customers, and expand their marketing list.
• Content news portals: their only purpose is to attract as many visitors to the website as possible through quality articles and other content.
• Websites with a customer service function: They provide information about a specific product or service.
• Branding websites: They want to increase customer loyalty through, for example, various loyalty programs.

Selection of the units of measurement

There are countless metrics available to companies in web analytics, so it’s very difficult to choose what’s valuable. Before collecting data, you need to think carefully about what you need. Based on the goals of the company, it is possible to decide which numbers are worth dealing with and which are unsuitable for analysis. Key performance indicators are commonly referred to as KPIs and their selection is a complex, company-specific task. For data analysis, it is worth turning to a specialist at least for the duration of the introduction, as there are more complex and more analyzable indicators than page download, visitor, and user metrics.

Once you have selected a KPI, you also need to think about segmented and aggregated data sets: on the one hand, aggregated data is essential to show how the performance of your website has changed over time. These data sets can answer questions that have increased or decreased website traffic; whether multiple conversions were achieved; or how much time did visitors spend reading the content? Unfortunately, the majority of people easily forget about analyzing segmented data sets The reasons behind the increase and decrease can be found in the segmented data. For example, you can find out which devices are being browsed by those who can be persuaded to buy to a large extent and on which devices the user experience should be improved. It is also possible to analyze the user path: where they first contact the website, what channels they were able to reach, and how far they go in the buying process.

After selecting key data, you should develop regular reports where you can compare the data. For example, the results can be compared with industry data, in some cases with competitors’ statistics, or with time series results from previous periods. Trend data provide a very good handhold for evaluating results, and you can also set target values.

.The parts of the development process

Web analytics also supports the development process. Once you’ve identified your business goal, tactics, units of measure, and goals, the process can begin:

• Measuring data: Use some IT tool (such as Google Analytics) to record user activity.
• Reporting: The results should be communicated in the form of a regular report. Analytics contributes with customizable report templates.
• Data Analysis: The analysis should identify errors and then identify areas for improvement.
• Testing: The functionality of the planned improvements must be verified so that unnecessary modifications can be avoided.
• Development: Introducing changes to the live system.

Which web analytics tool should you choose?

Google Analytics is the most widely used analysis tool in Hungary and worldwide. The biggest advantage of the program is that it offers completely free and great analysis options. Another important feature is that it is compatible with other Google services. Analytics will automatically know the results of your Adwords Search Network and Display Campaigns and connect to the Search Console to learn about organic search results.

Used properly, web analytics can become the backbone of your online segment. All of this because analytics can measure the performance of essentially every selected online marketing activity: search, ad exposure, social media, email – and I could list more. At the same time, analytics measure visitors to your site in the digital way they go, from the time they first visit your site to the time they become valued, returning customers.