How do web analytics work?

If at the site development stage you thought about what kind of users will come to it and how they will reach the target action (call, request, order), you are on the right track.

You can attract your target audience using SEO, contextual or targeted advertising, etc. Whatever method you choose, it is important to initially understand how to measure metrics for visitors, how to collect and analyze the necessary data. Web analytics systems allow you to implement all this.

Why do you need web analytics?

Web analytics contains all the detailed data on the sales funnel. Everything here works by analogy with offline trading. Part of the audience that passes near the store shows interest and comes in. Online, this is traffic to the site.

Some of those who visit become clients; this is recorded in web analytics as completed conversions. Moreover, online conversion is not always a purchase. Other user actions on the site – filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter – can also have business value. It all depends on the specifics of the business and your goals.

Other visitors leave empty-handed. These are called "bounces". You spent money on attracting a user to the site, but he did not complete the desired action.

Imagine that you have set up and launched advertising, have already spent a significant part of the budget, but there are almost no applications. Traffic to the site comes regularly, but does not convert, that is, does not turn into applications. Or it is converted, but not to the extent we would like.

Another case is that some visitors still make conversions, but the cost of one conversion is unreasonably high and is not recouped by the income from the transaction.

The fact that time and money went down the drain is not so bad. When there is no data for analysis based on the results, it’s even worse. This way, you won’t know why visitors didn’t move along the sales funnel and at what stage they “fell off.” And how to ultimately correct the situation, what to improve on the site so as not to repeat the same mistakes. It is impossible to guarantee initially that conversions will occur in the required quantity. But uncertainty can be avoided.

Web analytics provides a lot of numbers. Firstly, they can be used to accurately determine the company’s performance indicators: income, average bill, number and cost of requests, duration of the purchasing cycle.

If you have an online store, you can’t live without web analytics. Only thanks to it you will find out which products are more popular, how much income you receive over different periods, how much time it takes on average to make a purchase decision, how much a client spends on average, etc.

Secondly, you will learn almost everything about the user: from what resource, browser, device he came to the site, how long he spent studying the content, which pages he opened, which forms he filled out, which buttons he pressed, etc. Everything related to his online behavior, plus a “portrait”: gender, age, geography, interests, etc.

An important point to consider from the very beginning: metrics themselves do not tell you anything. It is necessary to translate from the language of numbers to the language of conclusions in order to find out what is hidden behind the data sets, what trends and events.

Here is a short algorithm on how to work with analytics:

1) Initially, you have a specific practical question: why sales have fallen, why there are no applications, etc. In search of an answer to this, you come to analytics.

2) You assume what could be the cause and formulate clear hypotheses. For example, the site receives few applications because visitors do not reach the call to action button.

3) Now you know what exactly you want to check, and look at the specific numbers. There may be several hypotheses - in this case, check each one in turn. There are no direct answers in analytics, but there is a lot of data that can be interpreted and extract valuable insights from it.

Please note that all conclusions will be approximate. Their accuracy depends on how deeply you dive into data analysis and how many factors you study. A simple principle works - everything is learned by comparison.

Regular work with data helps you timely determine the dynamics in the right areas, look for weak points on your website and look for solutions on how to strengthen them.

The next step is optimization: you decide how to improve the site and/or advertising campaigns, whether you need to allocate more budget to specific traffic channels, how to reduce the cost of attracting a client. But this is a topic for another article.

Highly qualified AVSEO specialists in web analytics and SEO promotion are ready to help at any time so that your business prospers and gains momentum.