Understanding Website Analytics: A Beginner's Guide

May 14, 2023

Understanding Website Analytics: A Beginner's Guide

You can track and analyse your website's performance using website analytics. In this beginner's guide, we will explore website analytics, what they are and how they work to help you optimise your website's performance and achieve your business goals.

What are website analytics?

Website analytics are the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of website data to understand and optimise web usage. They measure visitor behaviour, website performance, and audience demographics. Website analytics help you track the number of visitors your website receives, how long they stay on your website, what pages they visit, and how they interact with your website. This data helps you understand your visitors' preferences, identify issues that affect your website's performance and optimise your website user experience. There are many different metrics for measuring analytics, which can be overwhelming for newbies at first! It would be helpful to focus on a select few metrics in order to familiarise yourself whilst getting started. 

Why are website analytics important?

Website analytics help you understand your website visitors, track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, improve your website's user experience, and help you make better business decisions. For example, if most users on the site are visiting on a mobile device, a business can prioritise improving the website to be more mobile-friendly. Without website analytics, it's challenging to identify issues that affect your website's effectiveness and take steps to improve it.

In addition to providing metrics on visitors' behaviour, website analytics tools can also help you identify potential issues with your website's design or content. For example, if a page has a high bounce rate, meaning people are quickly exiting the website after visiting, a business may reassess the content on that page. 

Web analytics are also a useful tool to help you decide what kind of content and SEO methods work best for your audience. By seeing which posts get viewed the most, you can figure out what your audience likes. For example, if most people view your WordPress tutorial posts, it might be a good idea to focus more on these and less on other types of web-related articles. Also, by checking where your website's traffic comes from, you can decide where to put your resources. If you see that most of your traffic comes from organic sources and emails, rather than paid channels, you might want to put more effort into improving these areas.

How to use website analytics

Start by creating an account with a website analytics tool such as Google Analytics. Once you've set up your account, you'll have access to valuable data that can help you optimise your website's performance. When starting out, it is important to pick metrics that align with your business objectives, meaning you can build reports around these and set realistic targets. Tracking every single metric will provide too much information and will not be an effective use of time. After collecting data, you can use this to develop reports and make informed changes to your website. 

Conclusion 

Website analytics are a critical tool for understanding and optimising your website's performance. By using these metrics, you can make informed business decisions, improve your website's user experience and drive more traffic, leads, and conversions. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced website owner, it's essential to learn how to use website analytics to gain insights into your website's effectiveness. The more you know about your website's performance, the more successful your online business will be.

If you would like any additional information or support get in touch with our marketing and web experts. 

Email hello@influxdigital.com

Phone 0161 468 2612


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