How Analytics Can Make or Break Your Web Strategy

We have all probably heard by now that analytics are important but why are they important and how should you be using this data? Your analytics data is the key to understanding how customers are behaving on your website, so you need to use it wisely. Companies that place a high emphasis on data see an average annual revenue increase of 5.32% due to better data use. There are three steps you should take right now if you want analytics to work for – not against – your business: 1) understand analytics 2) analyze what matters 3) act on insights. Let’s go through each step to learn about how analytics can help you grow your conversions!

Understand Analytics

The first step to analytics is learning about the data itself. As we mentioned, analytics can help you understand how customers are behaving on your website and what they want from it, but that only works if you know where to look for certain information and how that information should be interpreted. You need to understand analytics in order for analytics to be effective, so let’s go over what you should know.

Analytics Vocabulary To Know

• Conversion – A conversion happens when someone completes the goal or action they set out to do on your website. For example, if someone sets out to make a purchase and completes their purchase, that would be a conversion. 
• Visitor – This is the term for any anonymous person visiting your website who leaves without converting or completing their goal/action on your site. You need to know what makes up these visitors so you can work to decrease their numbers and increase conversions. 
• CTR (Click-Through-Rate) – This is a ratio that represents how often people click on your ads. CTR tells you what type of ad copy and targeting works best for your website, which in turn can help increase conversions. 
• CVR (Conversion Rate) – This is the success rate of a certain goal or action being taken by visitors to your site. You need to know what your CVR is in order to know what goals are producing successful results on your site so that you can continue with them and improve upon them.

Key Analytics To Pay Attention To

There are two types of analytics that can be particularly effective in growing conversions: your site’s traffic and the behavior of your visitors. Site analytics tell you how much traffic is coming to your website, where it comes from (search engines or referrals), what pages they visited on their way through, and how many bounce without completing a conversion goal. It also tells you how long customers are staying on your website and what their overall experience is.

Behavior analytics, on the other hand, tell you about customer behavior through analytics tools like Google Analytics by tracking events – i.e., when they do something specific or visit a certain page of yours. This can be anything from clicking on an email opt-in to watching a product video to going from your homepage straight into the shopping cart. Analytics tools can help you see which pages are getting traffic and, therefore, what customers want when they get there – but data isn’t always perfect.

Analyze What Matters

Once you have collected the relevant analytics, it’s time to analyze what matters. The data you have collected represents the customer journey and that journey is going somewhere – either further into your sales funnel or out of it. You need to understand where people are dropping off so you can start making changes to improve conversions.

What Are “Good” Analytics?

There are average conversion rates you can look up and aim for, for instance, the average conversion rate for eCommerce in 2019 was estimated at 1.7%. However, with eCommerce, averages are heavily dependent on product type. The median conversion rate for food and drink is 3.58% while furniture is 0.68%, so you need to set realistic goals that match your industry, business size, and budget.

In addition, what you see is not always what it seems. There are a few things to keep in mind when looking at analytics that can help you understand the data and make better decisions based on them:

• The more traffic your site gets, the less likely these numbers will be accurate because there’s simply too much going on for analytics to track accurately.
• The more analytics you use, the less accurate your data will be because there’s simply too much information for platforms to process.
• Numbers are only numbers – they don’t automatically mean that something is working or not working on your site. They should be used as a guide only and taken into context with other analytics tools before any decisions are made about your data.
• Using data effectively takes time and effort, but it’s the only way to get a full understanding of how your website is performing.
• Your only competition you can truly measure is your success over time, set comparative date ranges to see how you’re doing over time rather than comparing yourself to a competitor without the full picture. 

What Analytics Should “Matter” To Me?

No analytics tool will be 100% accurate. However, there are a few key metrics that can help you make informed decisions about your web strategy. These include:

• Search engine ranking – Knowing where you rank on search pages for certain keywords is key because this tells you how much traffic you’re getting from people using those words as a way of finding websites. If it seems like no one is finding your website, analytics can reveal why.
• What pages are getting the most traffic – Analytics will show you which pages on your site are receiving the largest amount of traffic. These should be prioritized for improvement because they’re already working to bring people into your website or to specific parts of it where conversions happen (like the checkout process).
• Conversion rates – These tell how many people complete a conversion goal on your website. Conversion goals can be anything from clicking a button to buying something or signing up for an email list – analytics will show you what’s working and where conversions are happening so you know which parts of your site need improvement.
• Time spent on the site – Analytics tools measure how long people spend on each page, as well as the analytics of all pages on your site. This information will show you which parts of your website people are interested in and spending time with, so this can be a guide for what to prioritize when trying to improve conversions.
• Bounce rates – These tell how many people leave after visiting just one page or going from their browser straight into an email or shopping cart. Analytics will show you where people are dropping off so you can make changes to improve conversions and keep more visitors on your site longer.
• Customer behavior – Analytics tools are also great for understanding customer behavior and how they’re interacting with your site. If you notice that people aren’t watching the product videos or reading the long descriptions of products on your eCommerce store, perhaps it’s time to cut back a little bit in order to increase conversions.
• Mobile data – You have to know that your site is mobile-friendly because if it’s not, people are going to bounce faster than ever before and analytics can reveal why they’re leaving so quickly. If you don’t offer a responsive (mobile-friendly) website or app, analytics will tell you the exact moment when customers leave your site and never look back.

Analytics can make or break your web strategy because if you don’t have the right analytics in place, you could be making decisions based on incomplete information and losing out on potential customers as a result. If analytics are set up correctly, though, they can tell you what’s working well for traffic to your website and what’s not, and you can make changes accordingly.

Act on Insights

Analytics can provide a lot of insights but they’re not going to do anything unless you act on those insights. It’s estimated that 55% of data collected by companies is not used at all, don’t be one of them! Now that you know where people are dropping off in your sales funnel, it’s time to make changes and implement strategies for improvement.

In short, analytics can help your business grow but only if the right data is being collected from analytics platforms and only if the data is analyzed and acted upon.

What Should Be Your Priorities?

Every data analysis is going to be different because every website and business situation is unique. However, there are some goals that should always remain a priority for marketers in order to make sure they’re tracking the right data from analytics tools – conversions being one of them.

In addition, web traffic sources need to be tracked so you can understand where the traffic is coming from. There are analytics tools that will give you this information, but it’s important to know which tools your business should be using so you can get the most out of data in order to make informed decisions about how well your web strategy is working or not working for your company as a whole.

How Can EYStudios Help?

EYStudios has been helping businesses grow for over 17 years and analytics is one of our specialties. Whether you need help choosing the best analytics platform for your business or want to learn how to use data more effectively, we can provide strategic consulting that will guide you towards making better decisions about improving conversions on your website.

Contact EYStudios today to learn more about analytics consulting and how we can help you use analytics effectively in your web strategy.