Creating an online marketing campaign is a challenge, but determining if it is working by analyzing web analytics is another challenge entirely. Despite its usefulness, only 60% of marketers use social media analytics tools to track campaigns. Only 48% use metrics for brand analysis and even fewer use metrics to track competitive intelligence, with a surprisingly low rate of 40%. Here’s why it is vital to monitor web analytics for your business website.
Web Analytics Can Help Compete With Bigger Companies
The greatest benefit of using web analytics is that it allows smaller businesses like yours to compete with international corporations. Your business can carve out its own niche by using web analytics to track untapped markets and audiences that are already primed for your business. Larger companies have to maintain generalized appeal to the larger audiences they draw. This leaves room for smaller businesses to focus on quality over quantity and to provide a unique benefit to a smaller portion of the population.
The best way to hone into a niche audience is narrowing your focus to neglected keywords that visitors are using to find your business with tools such as Google Analytics. Web analytics plugins like SkyStats pull real time insights straight from Google Analytics and social media platforms so small business owners can see visitor traffic right from their WordPress dashboard.
Clearing The Path To Conversion
One of the greatest applications of web analytics is the use of tools such as Google Analytics and SiteWit to track where visitors go after leaving your website. By learning what steps visitors take before converting to customers, you can recreate those steps for future visitors. The Google Analytics metric behavior flow and user flow tracks how visitors are navigating thru your site, providing a solid place to begin your analysis.
Analytics help you find what works on your existing website so you can compound on that success. Whether one page is attracting a disproportionate rate of conversions or another page is underperforming, you can use this valuable information to fine-tune your website to be even more appealing to potential customers.
Helps You Track Other Advertisement Efforts
Once you have determined which metrics you would like to track for organic website traffic, you can begin to track traffic stemming from web advertising. Analytics are useful for monitoring paid search traffic to determine whether you are receiving a solid return on investment for your keyword campaigns. If not, you are empowered to tweak those campaigns to be more effective or move on to another campaign entirely. Analytics can even be used to track offline advertising, such as a magazine or other print advertisements that use QR codes to invite your audience to interact with you through their smartphones.
Diagnose If A Webpage Is Down
Metrics are also highly useful for general website maintenance, such as diagnosing whether a web page is down. You may not always realize if a page or feature of your website is not functioning properly, especially if you have a larger website with many pages. Analytics provide a general overview and result in patterns that help you determine what to expect from each page with a reasonable amount of variation. If there is an unusual drop on one of your pages that usually performs well, you can investigate to discover if the page is down so you can get your biggest traffic generator running again quickly.
Web analytics are essential for any business owner who wants to create a robust and adaptive online campaign. Analytics help you continually improve and help you avoid spending money on fruitless strategies.
Click here or call (817) 642-9686 to learn more about which web analytics you need to know for your business!
