Understanding Web Analytics

What’s Web Analytics and as Marketer should we be bother knowing it?

The answer is “yes” to both these questions.

What’s Web Analytics?

Web Analytics shows how (Internet) users are engaging with your website. It measures, collects, analyses and presents the data to help you a) better understand your user behaviour and b) optimize your website and digital marketing spends.

Google Analytics is the most popular and widely used Web analytics. This is because Google has created a whole ecosystem from learning tutorial to Google Analytics Demo to help Marketers/Website Owners to gain both theoretical & practical understanding.

On the other hand, Digital analytics includes both websites and mobile site and applications.

Now to understand the reason why Web Analytics has gained in prominence over the past 8-10 years

The first reason is due to steep rise in the number of websites. Web has become a worldwide phenomenon and in 2019 there were +1.7 billion websites (refer to the image).

Secondly due to Covid-19, companies/institutions have fast-tracked and invested heavily across digital technologies to meet the surge in digital interactions be it web conferencing, online shopping, education or entertainment.

Now let’s move to the next step on how to unlock insights so that you can deliver better experience to your users and achieve the targeted results.

While web analytics can offer wealth of information, knowing in advance what questions do you want to answer with this data can truly add value to your business. Always begin with a goal, execute the action plan, review the results and implement corrective actions. 

1. Define your goal: clearly outline your goals to help collect only those data, statistics relevant to your goal.
2. Interpret the data: analyze current versus past trends; notice deviations to see how this has affected your goals.
3. Develop Recommendation: arrive at actionable suggestions based on your data analysis to achieve your goals. .
4. Act: put your recommendation into practise.
5. Review your Outcomes: optimize the actions implemented to further to better improve business.

Finally let’s learn how to create a Web Analytics Strategy using Marketing Funnel.

A funnel strategy is your action plan how you intend to use your marketing assets at each stage of the funnel. In the offline world, this process can be hard to measure. But in the online world, you can track what online behavior led to the purchase and then use that data to make informed decisions about existing & potential customers.

Let’s use Google Analytics Reports and integrate it into the marketing funnel to better understand and interpret the data.

The different stages in funnel that describe customer interactions are summarized in following reports in Google Analytics:

1. Audience report captures both existing & potential users demographics to your website

2. Acquisition report provides insights on how users reach your website and gauges the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign

3. Behaviour report reflects how the user considers and engages within your website

4. Conversion shows the numbers of users who completed the transaction (goal) and now is a customer

Audience reports can help you better understand the characteristics of your users. It includes what countries they’re in, what languages they speak, and the technology they use to access your site. Further it also includes data like age, gender, loyalty and interests.

Acquisition reports is the most important and actionable reports in Google Analytics. It provides you insights on about how users get to your website and how well your digital marketing and advertising works across different channels like email, search and display ads. In addition you can discover which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions to help better manage your marketing spends.

Behavior reports show how users interact with your website. This can include different things from what content users view to how users navigate between your web pages. You can use this report to find low-performing pages that need improvement or high-performing content to guide future content marketing decisions.     

Conversion report helps us to track success of marketing campaign and sets up goals to measure conversions. Goals in Google Analytics lets you use the metrics in your reports with specific business objectives. This can be a powerful way to use data to understand whether you’re meeting your business goals.

To summarise knowing how to use Google Analytics or any other web analytics helps you to better understand your audience, improve the efficiency of digital marketing and increases website conversions.

Further as marketer you need to continuously look and interpret data by asking these questions - What data surprises you? What data doesn’t fit with what you expected? However, if you are not taking any action to improve the marketing strategy, then any analysis you just did was largely wasted effort.

Sources of Data: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy