Understanding customer behavior is also key to optimizing a website for key conversion metrics. For example, web analytics will show you the most popular pages on your website, and the most popular paths to purchase. With website analytics, you can also accurately track the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns to help inform future efforts.
Most analytics tools ‘tag’ their web pages by inserting a snippet of JavaScript in the web page’s code. Using this tag, the analytics tool counts each time the page gets a visitor or a click on a link. The tag can also gather other information like device, browser and geographic location (via IP address). Web analytics services may also use cookies to track individual sessions and to determine repeat visits from the same browser. Since some users delete cookies, and browsers have various restrictions around code snippets, no analytics platform can claim full accuracy of their data and different tools sometimes produce slightly different results.
Web analytics data is typically presented in dashboards that can be customized by user persona, date range, and other attributes. Data is broken down into categories, such as:
Audience Data
- number of visits, number of unique visitors
- new vs. returning visitor ratio
- what country they are from
- what browser or device they are on (desktop vs. mobile)
Audience Behavior
- common landing pages
- common exit page
- frequently visited pages
- length of time spent per visit
- number of pages per visit
- bounce rate
Campaign Data
- which campaigns drove the most traffic
- which websites referred the most traffic
- which keyword searches resulted in a visit
- campaign medium breakdown, such as email vs. social media