Let’s talk about web analytics

As a digital marketer you need information about users' behavior, and website performance to make decisions. This is where web analytics is important, because the data collected through web analytics helps digital marketers understand the effectiveness of their campaigns, identify areas for improvement, target specific audience segments, and measure the return on investment of their online efforts.

Want to know about web analytics?

Web analytics involves monitoring and comprehending the way individuals interact with your website, aiming to provide insights through data that enable you to enhance your site's performance and elevate user experience. The analytics tools used to track the activities happening on the site are on-site/hosted which is a piece of code installed on your site that will generate analytics unique to you. The second tool is off-site/third-party which is insights collected from third-party sources generates analytics data about multiple websites.

Peoples usually thinks about google analytics when they hear web analytics, however there are way more tools such as, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Adobe analytics, HubSpot, Charbeat, Open web analytics, Hotjar, and a few more tools that professional uses. These tools answer a few questions for marketers, which page did they visit? How many leaves after visiting a single page? Where do they come from? How many people visit your site? And how long do visitors spent on your most important page? Based on this insight you can improve your site to create a more user-friendly experiences for your target audience.

How Amazon use web analytic

With real-time activity which is every activities that occurred in the past 30 minutes, business like Amazon can see how many users visited the site, make a purchase, add items to cart, the amount of time spent on a page, what product the customer search, etc. Using those data reports Amazon marketer and finance can create strategy and improve certain areas for a unique target market. Web analytics allows Amazon to identify the steps users take before making a purchase. By analyzing conversion funnels, they can optimize the website layout, product placement, and checkout process to increase the likelihood of conversions. Analytic also help Amazon by making recommendation for customers based on behavior and past preferences.

What are the most important metrics for digital marketers?

There are three types of web analytics metrics to track. According to Hotjar “A metric is a quantitative data measurement that shows how a website or digital product performs. Metrics are expressed through numbers (number values, %, $, time) in a Google Analytics report”. The four most popular metrics are bouncing rate, revenue, conversion rate, and average session duration.

The first metric is acquisition-related metrics, which measure how you receive website visitors- how peoples landed on your website. Acquisition metrics include users, new users, and sessions. Users are visitors who interacted at least one session during a selected date range. New users are the number of new individual visitors in a specific date range, and lastly, sessions are all user interaction withing a specified time frame.

The second metrics is behavior-related metrics. This metric informs you about users' behavior patterns on your website such as the page most used, the time length that user spent on the page, and what action did they take on the site. Behavior-related metrics include bounce rate, exit rate, page per session, and session duration. Bounce rate referred to the percentage of single-page sessions or bounces across your site. Meaning landing on a page and leave without interacting with the page or clicking on a link to navigate to another page. Exit rate reports the action of a visitor leaving a page and this helps you understand the performance of specific webpages on your site. page per session is the average number of pages that users view during a session, basically page per session tracks engagement on your website. lastly, session duration is the average time a user spends on the website in a single session, a short session means that users are not engage with the content of your website.

The last metric is conversion-related metrics. Conversion is how many peoples take action like making a purchase after interacting with your website, reporting how many users converted and how much revenue produced.

The three key metrics of conversion-related are ecommerce conversion rate, transactions, and revenue. Ecommerce conversion are the percentages of visitors who completed a purchase on the website. Transaction reports the number of customer purchases. Revenue is the amount of money the business generated from the transaction on your website.

My takeaway from the GA4 courses

I had the opportunity to take the GA4 google analytic course in which i received my google analytic certification. I learned how to manage google analytic events, Google Analytics gathers and organizes data from events, along with their parameters and user properties, and creates reports utilizing dimensions and metrics. Dimensions address "who, what, or where?" inquiries, while metrics address the question "how many?". I learned how to manage and filter data that are collected, data filter lets you exclude incoming event data from being processed by Google Analytics. I also learned how the explore tool is helpful for advance analysis, the exploration template includes free form, funnel exploration, and path exploration. free form displays data in a cross-tab format, allowing you to organize rows and columns and incorporate the metrics of your primary interest. Additionally, various visualization styles such as bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatter plots, and maps can be applied. Funnel exploration enables you to visualize the progression of your users as they move toward a crucial task or conversion. This tool assists in recognizing sequences of significant events and gaining insights into how your users navigate through these steps. Lastly, path exploration lets you understand how people progress from one stage in the customer journey to the next.?

The course was very insightful and gave me a lot of knowledge of web analytics and how important it is for digital marketing.

Resources

For those interested on getting their certification or learn about analytics. Check out GA4.