Web analytics is very critical to the success of any digital business. It helps an enterprise understand its site visitors and use those insights to improve the experience on your site.
Many aspects of web analytics are specific to that particular business such as what metrics you track, how do you wish to build out reports, and what tools you wish to use. But there are some best web analytics practices that can help any enterprise collect, analyze, and report website data more effectively. Take a look at them below:
Focusing on maybe one or two metrics won’t provide enough insight into how visitors are interacting with your site, but tracking every single metric provides a lot of information to be actionable and worked upon with better future actions accordingly.
After collecting your data, determining whether or not you meet your target goals is only the first step of web analytics. The next and arguably more important step is using this data to test, experiment, and make better changes to your site.
Understanding and reporting traffic data including page views, top traffic sources, and most viewed pages is very much important for your website performance. High traffic doesn’t necessarily mean success and sales conversions.
While collecting and analyzing your website data, think about it in context with what variables or larger forces could be impacting the user numbers. Consider algorithm updates, seasonality, and bots that may all have a major impact on your traffic and other metrics.
As an analyst, you always wish to provide information to stakeholders in a way that is understandable and actionable So ask for information and ideas from stakeholders as well.
Who knows, they may provide some valuable feedback on how they use these data, what else they wish to see or understand about their users or website and how they think they can improve the overall user experience.