Web analytics vs business KPI
I think you heard these terms so many times but what do they mean exactly? A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use key performance indicators at multiple levels to evaluate their success in reaching targets. Effective KPIs focus on the business processes and functions that business executives use as most important for measuring progress toward meeting strategic goals and performance targets.
For online business owners or blogger owners, web analytics is the type of KPI needed to measure your website performance. You can use web analytics to measure the most important key performance of your online business presence such as website performance, traffic sources, audiences, customer behavior, marketing campaign performance, and return on investment (ROI)
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. However, Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research, and to assess and improve the effectiveness of a website.
An online business may have the best product or service, but if no one is able to find it on the web and no sale will be made. If no sale is made it means there is no revenue. The company will eventually go out of business very quickly. That is why web analytics is a huge part of online business practices because it allows to study the performance of the business and create more customized products and services to reach the right customers at the right place and at the right time
Web analytics allow you to evaluate your marketing campaign to increase your performance and your return on investment. It also allows you to know your business strength and weakness and create opportunities for scale and create more specific products to meet specific customer needs.
I class the most important key web analytic metrics into 4 specific categories.
Website performance
Landing pages: it is the first page the customer hit on your website (entry door to your site) after clicking on a referral link or searching for your website, products, or services on a search engine. It is important to keep track of the landing page because it will help you to know the most performing page on your website. Usually, I recommend keeping track of the top 10 pages.
A lot of information can be extracted from the landing pages for example which products or services listed on these specific pages, and what are the designs and customizations. It can help you as well to find the best user-friendly pages on your website. So, you can easily find which type of content is working for you. Based on this web analytic analysis, you can plan the next strategy content to reach more customers.
Page Views: One page view is a single view of a web page on your website by a visitor. The page view metric will show just how often visitors successfully access the content on your website. When there are a high number of page views, this could be due to the quality and value of the content on the website. On the opposite side when the number of page views is low it could mean you need to work more on the quality of your content. You can also use this metric to determine the 10 top pages and get insight from them.
Site speed: Site speed is the metric used for checking page timing (average page load time). Using these metrics, you can find which page is taking more time to load, how many pages have a high load time, etc. the load speed of your website pages will have a huge impact on your other web analytic metrics such as page view, bounce rate, and conversion rate.
Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page. The bounce rate reflects the percentage of visitors returning back only after visiting one page of your website. It helps you to know how many visitors do so. If the bounce rate of a website increases, it means that the webmaster needs to rethink his design and check the loading speed of web pages.
Exit Rate: don’t confuse bounce rate with exit rate. Sometimes it gets a little bit confusing. The bounce rate is when a customer land on your site and leave without vising any page in the other hand the Exit rate is when a customer land on the site and visits a few pages after leaving. You should pay close attention to the Exit rate because pages with a high Exit rate indicate there is a problem. Please be aware that some page is built to have a high Exit rate for example the thank you page after completing an order. In this case, the customer is done so he has to leave.
Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of people who achieved a goal on your site. Goals are things like completing a purchase, filling out a contact form, or viewing a certain page on your site. The conversion rate is very important because it is the ultimate measure of how successful your site is.
This is a very important metric to track because it’s the conversion rate that tells you how well you encourage your traffic to perform the desired action. In order words, the conversion rate tells you how successful or profitable are your website. Just think for a second, if you could increase your conversion rate by 1% or 2%, it could double your profit.
Obviously, the higher the conversion rate, the better your website is doing. A low conversion rate indicates that you are attracting the wrong traffic, your call to action is weak, and/or your sales copy is ineffective.
Traffic sources
Organic traffic: is the traffic coming through all search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing…). Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic (ads). High organic traffic is a good thing for your business because it means people are able to find your business from search results. Your business is able to generate new leads for free. There are many ways to generate more organic traffic. One of them is through SEO (search engine optimization). Writing your content more search engine friendly will help you to general a lot of organic traffic for free.
Social traffic: it is all the traffic coming from the social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. social traffic could mean also traffic coming to your website from a mobile site or mobile app from social networks and social media platforms. For example, a person who clicks on a tweet or a Facebook post and then arrives on your brand’s website will be counted in your web analytic reports as social traffic. Social traffic may be either paid or organic traffic, depending on if it comes or not from your marketing campaigns on social media platforms.
Referral traffic: Referral traffic refers to when people land on your website from links that appear on a different site. A good example of that would be affiliate marketing or email marketing when someone clicks on your referral link on another website and they land on your website. Referral traffic is essential and should be measured to evaluate which referral channel is more profitable and which ones need more attention. These web analytic metrics would help to evaluate your different referral marketing programs.
Direct traffic: Direct traffic is the traffics from users who entered your website URL directly into their browser search bar. This is good information to have because that will help you to understand your website traffic.
Audience analytic
Demographic data: Demographic data shows Age and Gender. With the help of Demographic Info, you can find the percentage of Male/Female visitors coming to your website. By analyzing the ratio of this data, you can make a strategy according to gender. Age group data help you find what percentage of age groups visit your website. So, you can make a strategy for the highest percentage of age group visitors
Devices: This data shows the devices’ info. In devices info, you can easily find how many percentage of visitors come from mobile, how many come from desktop, how many come from tablets, etc. If mobile traffic is high, then you need to make your website responsive
Return visitor rate: tracks what happens when someone returns to your website multiple times. This metric allows digital marketers to see how effective they are at building and retaining an audience online. This is particularly important to demonstrate the value of content marketing efforts.
Return visitor: The number of Unique Visitors with activity consisting of two or more Visits to a site during a reporting period.
New visitor: The number of Unique Visitors with activity including a first-ever Visit to a site during a reporting period
Average Time on Site: it is the average time on site a visitor has spent on your website during one session.
Marketing campaign
Lead generation costs (cost per conversion): This is the effect of a value per visit, and perhaps one of the more important metrics. Cost per conversion may also be referred to as “cost per referral or “lead generation costs”. If you have a high cost per conversion, it will not matter if your website is bringing in high conversion rates with a high value per visit. Your website will be cost-prohibitive—meaning that your net income will be zero or negative.
When you are trying to increase conversion rates on your website, you will need to keep the cost per conversion in mind, as well as the overall margins. Simply put, this is when you are not breaking even for what you are paying in order to gain conversion. When this number becomes a problem, take a step back and evaluate where exactly the costs are hurting your brand.
Value per visit: The value of each visit is bound immediately to the interactions per visit. This can be calculated as the total number of visits divided by the total value that was created. Calculating the value per visit is sometimes difficult because there are various intangible things that are involved in creating value that is hard to exactly define. As an example, visitors of a blog create value each time that they add a page view to your traffic number, but they will also create an intangible value when they leave a comment on your website. You can learn here.
