How can Analytics Help Optimise Your Website

Website analytics can heavily influence your data-driven marketing decisions. But for those who haven’t utilised analytics before, let’s answer the question, ‘How can analytics help optimise your website?’.

What are Website Analytics?

Website analytics provide data and information on how users interact and engage with the content on your website. Statistics have shown that website analytics can work in favour of marketing and online retail sites by securing an almost 100% return on their investment.

There are plenty of ways to access website analytics. Depending on what platform your website is built on, you can access analytics from there. For example, Shopify hosts a selection of website analytics tools for users. However, we recommend Google Analytics to view your website performance fully.

Understanding Analytics 

The key issue we’ve noticed with business tracking and analytics is the lack of valuable metrics being tracked. Many marketers fall victim to spending too much time focusing on vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics define the metrics that look good but mean very little. An example of this is impressions; it may look amazing to have 30,000 impressions on your page, but when you have a bounce rate of 85%, 30,000 means very little.

To gain a deeper knowledge of website analytics, check out our blog. ‘Understanding Website Analytics: Everything You Need to Know’ 

How can Analytics Help Optimise your site?

Once you understand how website analytics work and which metrics to focus on, you can use your data to make informed website decisions.

Update or Refresh

If you’re consistently writing and uploading content to your blog, often, the older content slips to the back of your mind.

If we look at the facts, only 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top 10 search results within one year for at least one keyword. For the majority, it was 2-3 years before ranking on page one of SERPs.

This highlights the importance of reviewing your older content. In a lot of industries, things are constantly changing and changing fast. So last year’s best practices aren’t this year’s, but instead of writing a whole new piece of content, update and refresh a piece you wrote last year.

Performing Pages

Use your website analytics to highlight your pages’ top performers. With Google Analytics, when you open up your analytics property, head to reports and then scroll down to ‘Views by Page title and Screen Class’. The report shows the top website pages by views, users, engagement time, and more.

With these metrics, you can make conscious decisions about which page content needs to be updated and which pages need a total refresh, rewrite, or even removal altogether.

*Before deleting or removing content from your site, ALWAYS think about link structure and the effects of removing this page.* For example, say you have internally linked one blog, to a deleted blog, this will result in a broken link on your website, something you want to avoid.

Traffic Sources

Do you know where your website traffic is coming from?

You can see which channel users came from with the traffic acquisition report in Google Analytics. This allows you to see which of your marketing channels is pushing the most traffic to your website and which channel is underperforming.

You can break down traffic sources further by adding the session source/medium filter. This allows you to see where users came from with insights much deeper than just ‘organic traffic.’

User Flow with Reports

With the explore feature in Google Analytics 4, you can use a range of reports to track user journey and activity.

Funnel Exploration – Start at a user’s first visit and filter through users by the steps you expect them to take. You are highlighting the abandonment rate from users at each checkpoint.

Path Exploration – Use tree graphs to highlight users’ paths through your site. This highlights paths you didn’t expect or may not want users to take. From here, with help from a web developer, you can adjust the layout of your page or site structure to solve the issue.

User Explorer – Uses the user ID to track specific user activities to understand individual interactions with your website and content.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Make sure you’re tracking valuable metrics.
• Don’t forget about old content – keep it updated and refreshed.
• Track your top-performing pages.
• Know where your users are coming from.
• Review user activity with reports from within Google Analytics 4.

Our Website Analytics and Tracking Services allow your business to unlock valuable insights about your website performance. Learn more here!