Is your social media presence increasing traffic to your website? Are subscribers responding to your email in actionable ways? Does the Money You Spend on Ads Really Make a Difference?
The answers to all of these important questions are hidden in your website’s data. Collecting, analyzing and using this data to produce measurable improvements in your website and your marketing strategies is known as website analysis. The website analysis measures key performance indicators (KPIs) and helps you to set improvement goals. But how do you collect this data and what do you do with it when you have it? What do you need to know to get started with website analytics tools?
The advantages of holistic analysis tools
Holistic analytics is exactly what it sounds like: you analyze all of your website data together. The advantage of this view of data is that you can see patterns and make connections that you might otherwise miss. For example, does your website traffic increase more if you blog at a certain time of the day? Are users more likely to interact with your social media posts when you insert pictures? This data may seem arbitrary when you look at it on its own, but seasoned marketers know that data viewed in isolation doesn’t tell the same story as data as a whole.
Another benefit of holistic analytics tools is that you can view data from multiple sources in one place. Many companies use multiple marketing channels, each of which has its own set of metrics to measure. You might think that this would mean visiting different websites to collect data for each of these channels, which would be inefficient as much of this data often provides very similar information with small variations. Fortunately, that is not necessary. Holistic tools allow users to import information from these different marketing channels into a web-based software program so that they can quickly find all of their data in one place. With the right tools, you can even incorporate non-marketing data that is relevant to your business.
Set up analytics tools for your website
Setting up analytics tools may seem intimidating, but the effort is more than worth it. There are only a few things to keep in mind in order to get the most of your exertion.
- Set clear goals to work on. Is your website’s goal to generate better leads? to improve the lead conversion rate? to increase the awareness of your products or services? Once you know the areas of your website that you want to improve, you can choose KPIs that provide relevant data that you can use to measure your progress.
- Determine the metrics that you want to measure. There are many website performance metrics you can measure, but some are more relevant than others to your goals. Some of the more common KPIs for websites are:
- Unique Visitors: The number of different people who visit your website. This is different from the number of views because a visitor can potentially visit your website multiple times. Each visit counts as a view, but only as a single visitor as it is the same person each time.
- Referrals: The place your visitors are coming from (e.g. social media, banner ads, or links on other websites).
- Keywords: The words and phrases you are looking for will lead them to your website.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who respond to your call-to-action, be it buying a product or service, requesting more information, or joining a contact list.
- Top Pages: The pages that your visitors spend the most time on. This is the information that your visitors will be responding to and will give you a sense of what is working on your website. Likewise, pages that visitors spend little time on may need to be tweaked to be more effective.
Dashboards: your analytics data at a glance
You may be wondering how do you keep track of all of the numbers from various sources that make up your analytics data. The answer is simple – an analytics dashboard. There’s a reason analytics dashboards are one of the top trends in labeling for 2019. A dashboard provides a visual overview of specific KPIs that you want to measure. For example, you could have a dashboard that tracks website traffic, including keywords and referrals that drive visitors to your website, or your dashboard could track conversion rate or e-commerce. The advantage of a dashboard is that all of this information is presented in the form of graphs and charts in one place, so you can collect large amounts of data quickly.
The current gold standard for dashboards is Google Data Studio. This powerful dashboard allows for more widgets per dashboard than most of its competitors, and unlike other dashboards that update data regularly, Google Data Studio provides real-time updates on your analytics. Dynamic controls on the reports allow you to interact with your data, easily browsing metrics, and filtering for the information you need most.
Let’s talk about what Google Data Studio can do for you.
The data experts here at our company are masters at creating bespoke and unified Google Data Studio dashboards that they have developed for over a dozen satisfied customers. Take the guesswork out of analysis by speaking to our expert team members. We’ll help you determine your website needs and set up a web analytics system that will help you achieve your digital tagging goals. We pride ourselves on data-driven marketing with proven results. Isn’t that what your company deserves? Call us today or email us to schedule a consultation and see what ours expertise can do for you.