Marketing Your Website - The Importance of Using Analytical Tools
You create a beautiful website for your business, optimize it for search engines, market it through social media, and start receiving visitors. But wait! Do you even know where your visitors are coming from? Are they even interested in what you have to offer or are they just passing their time? How many of them are actually interested in purchasing your product or service?
Answering such questions might seem difficult, but it won’t be once you setup a tracking tool within your website. A tracking tool will enable you to track your visitors, their sources, the number of clicks, the number of conversions, etc. Analytics are crucial because they will help you understand why something in your digital marketing strategy works and why something doesn’t.
For example, you will determine how engaging your latest Twitter or Facebook post was, which landing page is the best, etc. Since you have invested time and money on your website, it’s important to define goals and use them when measuring web analytics. You can use this valuable information to improve your website and make the necessary changes to correct the particular problem.
What will You Determine?
Website analytics will help you determine 6 essential pieces of information.
- The type of people visiting your website; do they belong to your target audience?
- Their physical location and how they searched for your website. This data will help you gauge the success of your SEO campaign.
- The pages they visit and the kind of action they take.
- The time when your visitors are using your website.
- The reason a visitor is visiting your website.
- The channel through which they reached your website.
Why Is Analytics Important?
Website analytics are important because they will provide you with the following capabilities.
- You Can Set Specific Goals: The goal of having a website is not to just receive visitors, but to have those visitors take specific actions. With analytics, you can setup particular goals and determine how close you are to achieving them. For example, you might want your visitors to go to the booking form, online store, inquiry page or a particular landing page.
- Improve Your Website and Marketing Campaign: With analytics, you will understand both your website’s and your marketing campaign’s shortcomings. Then you can improve upon them. You will get to know how your visitors interact with your website and how they navigate through it. Then you can adjust your website to better guide your visitors. For example, you can place call-to-actions in pages with the most traffic to guide them to a specific page.
- Enhance Your Visitor’s Experience: Through analytics, you can see what devices visitors are using to access your site. Are they browsing your website using a tablet or smartphone? If so, you may need to optimize your website for mobile devices and make other adjustments to improve the visitors’ experience.
- Improve Your Marketing Strategy: Since marketing is a critical component of a business, analytics will aid you in determining the weaknesses and strong points of your marketing strategy. For example, you can modify the keywords which visitors use to reach your website, improving your SEO or paid advertising. Or you can develop tailored content depending upon the visitors’ geographical location.
Analytics Tools
There are a number of free tools availalble to track your website traffic. Two of the most popular are:
Google Analytics- sign up at https://www.google.com/analytics/
Statcounter- sign up at http://statcounter.com/
In most cases, you will simply add a code to your website to enable traffic. Full instructions are provided after you setup the website analytics account.
Please reach out to us if you need any help with tracking your website traffic.
Sources
http://www.professionalacademy.com/blogs-and-advice/why-are-web-analytics-so-important-to-marketers-and-businesses-alike-
http://lazcreative.com/blog/business/web-analytics-the-importance-of-measurement/
https://www.yola.com/blog/how-to-use-analytics-and-why-theyre-important/
http://collectiveindustries.co.uk/web-analytics-tools/
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