A website without analytics is useless. Okay, that sounds provocative on its face, and maybe it’s fair to say a website without analytics can serve a purpose. That qualification aside, website analytics are the best thing we have to understand your website visitors, what they want, and the return your website is providing from your investment. Without analytics you are leaving these things to chance, if not missing out on them entirely. What other aspects of your business are you willing to invest in without understanding its return?

How do website analytics provide these valuable insights? Here are our five favorite ways, but reach out to us if you would like to discuss these and others with your team.

1. Understand who your visitors are

While you may think you have an idea of who your target customer is, proper analytics will help you learn more about who specifically interacts with your brand online. After all, your website isn’t a brick-and-mortar store where you can physically see each customer who visits. Website analytics can give you a better insight into who is visiting your site by providing important demographic data such as age, location, gender, and more. This information can help you to better geotarget your customers and implement marketing strategies that could persuade them to buy from you.  

2. Insight into what content is performing best

Have you ever spent time building content only to find it didn’t land like you thought it would? Measuring the performance of each piece of content you produce through pageviews, average time on page, and bounce rate can give you great insight into the content you’re producing. Setting up filters in your site analytics to compile blog statistics can be a great way to understand what content resonates best with your audience. Does a particular subject area of content perform better than others? Save yourself the time (and headache) by using your site’s analytics to create content you know will (likely) perform well.

3. Enhance your users’ experience

Are you trying to drive your customers to complete a certain activity on your site, like filling out a contact form, signing up for a free consultation, or clicking a specific button to download a resource? Website analytics can help inform you if potential customers are finding these places on your site and following through with what you want them to do. If analytics show that potential customers drop off your site (indicated by a high bounce rate on a specific page), this can be a sign that your pages need some changes to enhance the customer experience and put them on the path to conversion.  

4. Understand where visitors are coming from

Do you know how visitors are finding your website? Are you able to attribute certain marketing activities (social media marketing, advertising on Google, paid placement on a list, etc) with website visits? Analytics are the key in helping you close that loop. A helpful way to immediately track the success of different advertising efforts across the web is to implement a UTM strategy to begin categorizing website traffic. Many website analytics tools can easily categorize this information and help inform your decision-making when it comes to focusing your marketing efforts.  

5. Improve your site’s SEO and visibility

When you have insight into what search terms are driving people to visit your site, you can make changes to optimize pages to rank in search engines for specific keywords. This can also help you to add valuable search terms into your Google or Bing advertising campaigns to drive more users to your site.

Unsure of what tools to use when it comes to website analytics? Here’s a few ideas for you (and bonus – they’re all FREE for you to try out!):

  • Google Analytics: This one is a go-to for many marketers. Simply embed the Google Analytics tracking code on your site to begin collecting valuable data on your site visitors. This tool can be a bit complicated to understand at first, but Google has a wide variety of training available to bring you up to speed. Our team uses Google Analytics to understand the source of our website traffic through filters to narrow in our marketing efforts.

 

  • HubSpot: Not a fan of how complicated Google Analytics can be? Try HubSpot instead. Embed HubSpot’s free tracking code on your site to collect website visitor data and interpret said data to easily understand important site metrics like visitor source, pageviews, and more. The feature our team loves the most about HubSpot is the built-in capability to easily attribute which contacts came from specific marketing efforts (and if they ultimately contributed to a sale).

 

  • HotJar: Trying to understand more about how users interact with your site? HotJar is the tool for you! This innovative tool allows you to create heatmaps and record a user’s behavior as they move from page to page on your site (anonymously of course). We use this tool to optimize pages of our site to create a better user experience.

 

Want to learn more about optimizing your site to maximize traffic? Check out these eight quick changes you can make now to improve your site!