Many business owners rave about the high website traffic and the number of visitors on their site but in reality, high traffic is insignificant if it does not get converted into potential customers.
These owners are not aware that most traffic must be generated from landing pages. A website which shows high traffic, but low conversion rate indicates that visitors do not return, and they are not interested to visit any other page of the site after the landing page hence this results in a high bounce rate.
If you are just concentrating on the number and not conversion, sales will suffer. A smart business owner will know how to operate web analytics. So this brings us to our next question, “What is web analytics”? It is the collection of analytical reports to understand the behavior of the customer on a website.
Following are certain points to remember while using web analytics if you are looking for more sales
Know Your Objective:
Just going through graphs is of no use if you have no strategy planned. Understand what your goal is, if it is conversion then you need to focus on reading the analytics about which strategies are bringing in more conversion. Blindly observing graphs without planning a specific goal will just be a waste of time. If you know the right way to work on web analytics, you can increase the conversions exponentially.
Site Traffic Alone is Not Enough
As we have discussed earlier, your analytics may be showing a trend of a high number of visitors but is that leading to better conversions? If not, this data is misleading as just the quantity of people visiting a site does not make it successful if they do not engage. Understand the behavior of visitors, see the pages they visit and the ones from where they leave the site. Optimize those pages and check if the conversion rate increases. Keep tweaking until the engagement increases.
Check if the Visitors are Quitting from the Sites Homepage:
Homepage bounce rate may result in no conversion as most visitors click through a few pages before they are convinced to do business with you. If your visitors are bailing from your homepage, it means there is a problem with the landing page and your visitors are not compelled by your content, the page needs to be optimized for better user experience.
The purpose of a website is to generate profit due to sales but if your traffic is high and the conversion rate is low, it means the visitors are not reaching the right landing page. Every visitor may have a different requirement hence make sure the navigational structure of the site is clear so that a visitor can migrate to the offer or product they are interested in.
Analyze Social Media Impact
Web analytics can be used to determine how your social media efforts are resulting in and which platform is bringing in more engaging customers. A social media platform may bring lots of traffic to a page but that is not enough if the conversion rate is not going up. If you are not focusing on the right audience, then your marketing efforts will not result in a conversion. Web analytics can determine this data and help you optimize your social media marketing efforts.
Verify Page Rankings
Each website has a high ranking and low-ranking pages which can be determined by a web analytics tool. Low ranking pages do not create a good engagement hence it needs to be optimized to improve its performance. Through web analytics, learn the page which brings in good conversion and try to determine the elements on the page that could be the reason for its success. Implement the same to the low ranked pages and see if the conversions of the page do better.
Follow Customer Path:
Through web analytics, you can determine a customer’s navigational path which is the landing page, the links he browsed through and the exit page. Analyzing this data will give you a clear insight into the pages which attract the visitors to click on and the page which does not inspire the visitors to stay on your site more. Learning these details can help you improve your website and the links which are weak so that the time spent by a visitor on the site increases which in turn increases the chances of conversion.
Don’t Get too Distracted by Numbers:
Analytics can be an amazing way to improve your engagement, but it can be a time-consuming task as well. Too much of analytics may lead to no time to update your website and add new content. Remember web analytics is to help you but do not let it take over all your time. Keep a balance between working on new website content and analyzing the site through web analytics as you cannot keep your audience engaged if your website is not frequently updated.
Focus on Your Customers:
Web analytics is a great tool but at times digital marketers are so dependent on the analytical data that they forget to use their common sense. The purpose of your using analytics is to understand your customers’ behavior and web analytics can help you do that but over dependency on graphs can drown your business. For example, if you are looking for data in web analytics about how your customers prefer to browse your site, mobile or desktop, this actually is a no-brainer, but many marketers blindly are so engulfed by data that they forget the actual customers. Keep your perspective clear.
Web analytics may seem a bit complicated initially, but it is a great tool to understand the changes you need to make for a successful business and if you are able to use it effectively, your conversion rates will start reaching sky high.
