Digital Analytics: Do you need it?

the simple answer is 'yes!' Regardless of whatever you are doing in the world, data is king and that’s a fact. So why miss out on all the important data your website could be giving you? Your website is your online shop window, so you need to be able optimise it as best as you can to suit your market and more importantly your customers’ needs. This can be done accurately through the use of digital analytics.

How Can I Use Digital Analytics?

There are loads of different areas you can dig into to find that golden nugget of data, so here are a few of the most common yet important areas within digital analytics.

Measuring Site Performance

This can be measured in a number of ways from how the user is engaging with the website or how long it takes to load. When looking in terms of how the user interacts with the site, there are some basic values you can use.

‘Visits/Sessions’ allow you to determine how many users are visiting your site. On top of this you also have ‘new visits/sessions’ which shows how many of those visits are actually new ones.

Now you know exactly how many visits the site has, you have to ensure your visitors are engaging with the site and are not being put off by a certain factor. This can be a number of things, whether it’s the site loading time, lack of mobile responsiveness, or if it’s not what they were looking for. Digital analytics can be used to determine the average number of Pages the user visits and the average time each user spends looking around. You can also see the bounce rate, which gives you an indication on whether they are interacting with the site further than just the home page and clicking away before the site loads.

Digital Analytics and Site Traffic

So not only do you know whether your site is getting visits or not but you also know where your visitors are all coming from. It may seem incredible that you’re getting 500+ visits a month, but are they actually the visitors you want?

‘Traffic Values/Acquisitions’ can help determine this. They tend to be split into a number of sections such as direct traffic, organic searches, paid searches, referrals and social media.

Each one of the above can help you work out where your sites users are coming from. This is an extremely useful piece of data if, for example, you have been performing some SEO tweaks and want to compare organic search results with last month’s values, or to see if your recent engagement in social media has brought any visits to your site.

Visitor Behaviour

Behaviour is a selection that allows you to further analyse your site in detail. It is particularly used to determine how the sites content is being used and the users’ behaviour.

Site content is an area of digital analytics that shows what pages are being visited, including landing pages, and what pages users are exiting the site on. Exit pages data can be especially important if there are a number of pages that have a high bounce rate or a high amount of visits but visitors are not spending time on the page.

You can then drill down further into your digital analytics with the site’s speed and what search terms users are making to get to the site. Unfortunately, one mistake that's commonly made with search terms is that it will tell you what keywords are most popular with users; however under changes to Google privacy policies you can no longer view all users’ exact search terms.

Digital Analytics to Track Conversions

Say you want to add a new service to your website or a new product to your online store and heavily promote it via social media, but you also want to track the impact. Well, conversions/goals will allow you to set a number of patterns or events that take place on the site.

For example, if you were to add a new post to your blog that promoted a new product on your store, you could set a goal to track when the user visited the post, continued further to the products page, added the product to their basket, visited the checkout page, and then hit the order confirmation page.

It’s really that simple, and a perfect example of how important data is to your site and how you can use digital analytics to improve most importantly your visitor’s experience.

Digital analytics: A real-life example

I always like to give a real-life example wherever possible as it can help set in stone previous examples as given above.

We recently had a customer approach us about their site’s performance. While they were still getting similar visitor rates, their overall advertisement return and impact from news posts had gone down dramatically.

After an initial dig around the stats it was apparent that the users visiting the site were leaving within approx. 30 seconds, giving a high bounce rate and a decreased visitor time and no further engagement.

Now, as we had no information regarding the site’s history, we had to dig down even further into their digital analytics to determine the actual cause of the site’s lapse of visitor interaction. Based on the timings, we found out that the site had a recent update in its design. Surely you would expect an update to the site’s design to increase its engagement? Well the famous saying is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" and in this case that is exactly right.

Elements of the site had changed and did not improve the site’s engagement for the user, causing the higher bounce rate as the users were simply leaving the site straight away.

So, as you can see, if this customer did not have that analytic data that had been running throughout the site’s history we wouldn't have been able to use it to determine the reasoning behind the site’s lapse of visitor interaction.

Overview

So, as you can see, the possibilities with digital analytics is endless, and when it is put into practice it can be a powerful asset to your site and online presence. But don’t forget; Google analytics and a number of other tracking software is completely free to use - which I hope gives you even more reason to get it setup on your site.

You may be thinking to yourself "I don’t have the time to start digging into all this," and yes, I can totally understand that, but my answer would be to just get it setup on your site and leave it for a couple of months. At the end of the day, it will always be there running in the background collecting all that important data for when you may actually need it in the future. Just like the real life example.

And if you really don't have time for all that, we can help. Get in touch today to find out more about our professional website services.