What is web analytics?
Web analytics uses internet data to improve and help you make the best use of your website and digital marketing efforts to drive traffic.
Web analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analysing and reporting web data. It helps businesses to improve their understanding of how their website is being used. You can collect and analyse huge amounts of data, so it is important to know what data you need to collect to get the most from it.
Web analytics can help you understand how users interact with your website. It can help with:
- finding out how visitors find your website - telling you where and how best to advertise
- seeing what people look at on your website - telling you how easy your site is to navigate and what is the most successful area of your site
- seeing whether any sections of your site do not perform as required - telling you if you need to make changes to your site to improve its effectiveness
- measuring the effectiveness of your website beyond simply counting visitor numbers
- gaining a detailed understanding of all your e-commerce activity
- judging the effectiveness of your web content by tracking different content types
- benchmarking your online marketing, which will help you plan, optimise and measure future campaigns
Web analytics can help you get a full picture of the effectiveness of your online marketing. This gives you the best chance of converting visitors into customers. The website sits at the end of the customer journey in the online marketing mix. Even if you do not sell through your website, it can still be a valuable marketing tool.