Why tracking your website traffic is so important

Your businesses website is a powerful tool for generating income. Great design and useful content are vital to gaining traffic but if you don’t understand how your users are interacting with your website you could be losing valuable leads.

Often when a site is created, a lot of time and energy is put into generating traffic whilst almost none is put into monitoring it. Tracking your website traffic is one of the most important things you can do to significantly increase income from your site. Only 8.4% of websites use tracking software, having this in place can give you insights that can help you race ahead of your competitors.  Knowing your user’s behaviours allows you to target your marketing efforts in a more productive way.

Google Analytics provides valuable insights into your website and its users. Using the data, it collects can help you shape your businesses marketing strategy and optimise your site for your customers. Having the tracking code on your website can potentially provide you with valuable insights into your customers that you would never otherwise have access to.

What does Google Analytics do?

Google Analytics allows you to track and understand your website user’s behaviour. You can look at where on your site your users are visiting, where they are dropping off. This allows you insight into whether or not your business is meeting your audiences needs.

How does Google Analytics report data?

The foundations of all Google Analytics reports are built on Dimensions and Metrics.

Dimensions – These are the attributes of your data such as location, device or operating system.

Metrics – These are the quantities measurements for your data.

What kind of data does Google Analytics track?

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, too much to cover in one single blog post. It can be a bit overwhelming to look through at first and difficult to figure out what is important to your particular business.

How does your traffic arrive at your site? Through organic searches, referral links, social media? Are they coming through mobile or desktop? Knowing and utilising this information is key to creating an effective marketing strategy. What are their interests? What age are they? Where are they located? What pages on your site have high bounce rates? Where is the conversion process are your users dropping off?

Knowing where your users are coming from, who they are and how they interact with your site means you can create effective advertisements and content for the right platforms that will generate the best ROI.

Benefits of using Google Analytics

SEO

Tracking your visitors, where they spend time on your site, what page they land on, what source they are coming from can give you a better understanding of how effective your keywords and content are. When building a new site it can be difficult to know where to start with keywords and content. Clearly defining your audience and your businesses objectives are a good place to start. Then, when your website has been up and running for a little while reviewing your website analytics can let you know if you are on the right track of if you should revise your SEO strategy and update content.

Website improvements

By finding out where traffic drops off you can then edit those pages for a better user experience. For example you might find a lot of traffic is dropping off on your Contact form. This could be because there a lot of fields to fill in and this deters users. You can then change the form, simplifying the fields and review to see the change in traffic drop off.

You can determine which pages your users are most engaged with. This helps you with coming up with new useful content for your website that your users will enjoy.

Targeted advertising

Knowing where your users are located, their age, gender, and interests makes it easier to create more effective marketing campaigns. Analytics allow you to target people that are similar to your users, in the same location, that have the same interests and there is a greater chance that your advertising will be effective and generate sales.

You can also track your online ads in analytics. You will be able to see where your users are coming from and if your ads are generating traffic and sales. This allows you to review any campaigns and make amendments to them to see if another strategy would be more effective.

Tracking on your website is a simple process to set up that can be highly beneficial to your business. If you would rather leave it to someone else a creative agency is something you might like to consider. You will get deeper insights and they can then be applied to any future marketing done for your company, to learn more about the website and analytics we offer get in touch.