Web Analytics
Web analytics groups together the measurement, collection, analysis and presentation of data from the internet in order to understand and optimise how websites are used. Web analytics lets you precisely study user behaviour on your websites, it is a key element in digital marketing and website optimisation (What is Web Analytics? - definition 2018).
Web analytics allows developers of websites to analyse information about the visitors to the website. The following information can be extracted from web analytics:
- where traffic is originating from
- the number of visitors at a given time
- the best day of the week/ time of day in terms of number of visitors
- the number of pages viewed
- the keywords that attract the most visitors
- average time spent on the site/ particular pages
- geographical location of website visitors
- what types of pages or posts attract the most visitors
- the traffic from which visitors originate that produce high sales volumes
- bounce rates
High bounce rates indicate problems with the way that the site is received by the visitor. A user bounces when there has been no engagement with the landing page and the visit ends with a single-page visit. You can use bounce rate as a metric that indicates the quality of a webpage and/or the “quality” of your audience(Understanding bounce rate in Google Analytics • Yoast 2018).
Bounce rates may be high due to a number of reasons, poor web design could be a reason, the visitor may not be impressed by the design and might judge the products being sold similarly. An old looking, out of date design might make the visitor question whether the business is still trading or is trustworthy. If a website is difficult to navigate or slow to load visitors might leave due to frustration, annoying pop-ups could also be distracting and unwanted by some visitors. Multimedia such as auto play videos or audio content could also be too distracting, they could be giving an immediate 'negative impression' of what the website represents. Meta descriptions could be misleading and they could be attracting the wrong intended demographic, bounce rates can be improved by a number of different measures.
Pictured below is a table that shows the four different types of analytics; descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. These four types of analytics can be further categorised as either being useful in hindsight, able to provide insight or enable foresight. Web analytics provides a wide range and a comprehensive vision of how the website is performing, which is critical for maintaining and improving results. It is not enough to analyse the information given by analytics. After the assessment of analytics has been made, continuous action should be taken to improve the performance of the site. Marketing campaigns can be better targeted towards areas that result in higher sales and improvements can be made to the website itself to improve it's attractiveness to potential customers. Analytics must be reviewed regularly in order to achieve favourable results.
(The Four Types of Analytics 2018)
Analysing Mini Steps
I installed the Google Analytics Dashboard for Wordpress plugin so that I could assess the performance and areas of weakness within the Mini Steps site. I entered my website's URL and details into my Google analytics account, from here I was issued a Google analytics ID tracking code. I entered the ID code into the Google analytics settings on my Wordpress dashboard and linked my website domain to Google analytics, please see below.
Google Analytics enables owners of websites to access real-time information about the visitors accessing their site. The screenshot below was taken as two visitors were using Mini Steps, information is given about the page views and the active pages.
The screenshot below captured the real-time activity report when the site reportedly had no visitors.
Historic information can be retrieved about the audience that the website has attracted. The screenshot below gives information about the users of the site that visited over a number of days. Highlighted is the bounce rate which is 28.57%, the page views which were 87 and the location of the users which is stated as Bromsgrove and Redditch. Most websites will see bounce rates fall somewhere between 26% and 70%. As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent (What's the Average Bounce Rate for a Website? 2018). Page views could be higher, I could create a marketing campaign from a social media channel in order to drive more traffic to my site.
Visitors tend to arrive on the site around midday, with Tuesday being the busiest day of the week, as seen in the screenshot below Based on the results seen below, I would target these particular times during the day/ week with marketing campaigns in order to capture the attention of the greatest number of users possible.
The most popular pages can be seen listed below. This information could be used to improve pages that are not popular. Popular pages could suggest popular products, images of these products could be used to front advertising and help boost sales.
Web analytics combined with powerful SEO and popular Social Media channels are critical in the performance of an e-commerce site. Good utilisation of these techniques can help beat competition and yield successful results.
REFERENCES
What is Web Analytics? - definition (2018). [Online] Available from: https://www.atinternet.com/en/glossary/web-analytics-2/ [Accessed 1 April 2018]
Understanding bounce rate in Google Analytics • Yoast (2018). [Online] Available from: https://yoast.com/understanding-bounce-rate-google-analytics/ [Accessed 1 April 2018].
The Four Types of Analytics (2018). [Online] Available from: http://www.ciandt.com/card/four-types-of-analytics-and-cognition [Accessed 1 April 2018].
What's the Average Bounce Rate for a Website? (2018). [Online] Available from: http://www.gorocketfuel.com/the-rocket-blog/whats-the-average-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics/ [Accessed 2 April 2018].
Comments
Post a Comment