How To Make A Good Web Analytics Report

How To Make A Good Web Analytics Report:

They say if your business is not online, it is as good as non-existent. Of all the business websites, less than 20% employ web analytics to track the performance of their site. One needs to remember that what a company needs from their website and what purpose the website actually serves may vastly differ. If you have a website, it is most crucial to study the visitor experience and analyze the data generated. The data gathered, however, can be overwhelming and vast and therefore knowing what information is worth tracking and what isn’t becomes extremely important if you want to use web analytics effectively.

The following seven points are crucial to create a significantly insightful web analytics report:

1. Basics: This includes tracking numbers that help you understand the visitor statistics and hence help you take necessary actions that may end-up making the website efficient and effective. How many people visited the site? From which traffic source did they come from? Who the users are? Which pages did the look at? Which pages did they spend most of their time on? The answers to these questions should then be compared to the goals that you set out with. Analysis of this data will help you figure out if your site is working. It will also hint toward what needs to be done for the site to work better and for your goals to be achieved in a faster and efficient manner. For example, if your site needs 2000 visitors a day, and web analytics show that most of your visitors currently come from a certain search engine, placing adverts and working on SEO would be the solution.
2. Performance: Visitors could be engaged more on a certain page but look carefully. Is it because the particular page takes too much time to load? If a certain page has more engagement rate and/or more clicks, is it because the page coughs up errors and hence requires reloading. This could damage the website’s and the company’s reputation in the long run. So, even though the data makes the performance seem good, it must be used to cross-check and make sure that the website is functioning well.
3. Campaign effectiveness and ROI: If you have a website, then you must invest in some marketing activities across the internet to get more traffic. However, your marketing campaigns and initiatives have to be measured. One has to understand how many visitors are being generated for every $ spent. Web analytics is the best way to track, measure, and optimize website traffic, conversion rate as a result of your online marketing initiatives. It can also play a key role in helping you decide which online campaign method to select, how much to spend, which campaigns are not performing  and which ones are high performing campaigns deserving higher budget allocations, etc.
4. Goal conversion rate: This will indicate the percentage of visitors that convert on at least one of the goals defined for the profile of the website. It tells you exactly how the website translates into business development. This is the ratio of site visitors against the goal set up by company, which can be number of form submissions, catalogue requests, trade enquiries, call back requests, actual sales, etc. It is this number that will tell you whether your website has helped your business at all.
5. Geographical stats: Knowing which geographical region gives you maximum traffic can help you understand your website user behavior better and also help you differentiate between your offline and online market. A popular calendar company’s website received majority of its hits from the US. After analyzing the data, they realized that their product had a huge market among Marathi immigrants to UK and US. They ended-up developing a soft copy of the calendar and this started generating revenues from their website.
6. Keyword phrases and search data: Knowing which keywords led the user to your site is crucial information that can help you with SEO. This data also holds a key to understand which key phrase is used most. Understanding what the visitors were looking for when they stumbled upon your site. Answers to questions like, are these relevant searches, if yes, is the website fulfilling the user’s need, will help you create a better user experience for your site.

Every website is different hence has different needs from web analytics data, however, generally speaking, the seven points mentioned above, should help you build a clear picture about your website’s performance.