5 Reasons Your Business Should Be Tracking Analytics
Do you have a business website? If so, great; but have you checked whether it is actually doing its job? Who is visiting your site? How did they get to your site? What pages and content are they viewing? Understanding and checking your website’s analytics (simply put, tools that offer insights into how your site is performing) is not only very important, but it’s also quite fun! Here are five reasons why you should be tracking website analytics on a regular basis:
1) Track and react to trends in real time. If you don’t know exactly what is causing a spike or drop in traffic, you cannot control future trends. And your understanding will be much deeper when you watch trends in real time as everything is fresh in your mind. So, why wait? With Google Analytics’ live reporting feature, Real-Time Reporting, you can immediately measure the impact of recent social media activity or a new blog post – and make necessary tweaks before any issues become significant.
2) You can monitor where your traffic is coming from and better determine where to allocate resources. Are your visitors coming from Facebook, Instagram, your email list? Are they typing in your URL directly? Coming from referring sites or an organic search? (i.e. searching on Google then clicking on your website in the real search results) Your analytics will tell you the number of visitors that are coming from whatever social media or sales funnels you have setup, or via Google or similar search engine. Once you know where your customers are coming from, you’ll know where to reach them and can adjust your marketing strategies as such. For example, if you notice that you receive very few visitors from organic traffic, perhaps it’s time to up your SEO game. Or, you may see that your traffic is heavily weighted toward your email subscribers, and so you’ll know to spend your time providing even more value through your newsletter.
3) You can get tons of keyword insight. Keywords are king! Keywords are the words and phrases that people are searching for in search engines (i.e. Google) to get to your site, and analytics will let you know what keywords and terms are popular for your niche. Once you know which keywords are generating the most website traffic, you can start thinking about how best to optimize these keywords – on your website, social media and other online resources.
4) You can gain a better understanding of what content your audience likes. Looking for inspiration for your next blog post? Give your visitors more of what they want by keeping track of all the content that receives top views and shares. For example, if you notice certain blog posts, slide shares or infographics are performing well, you’ll know you should create more like that to generate increased traffic and potential visitors.
5) You can assess and improve your bounce rate. A bounce is when a visitor comes to a page, but doesn’t interact with the page in any way and then leaves. Essentially, people are coming to your site and either finding what they want but not anything else or not finding what they want at all. The key is to make sure that once visitors land on a page, they are drawn to visiting even more pages throughout your site. To improve the visitor website experience, keep track of the bounce rate for each page and the pages with high bounce rates should be given a technical checkup and enhanced for attractiveness, simplicity and accessibility.
Understanding and keeping check of your website’s analytics is a wonderful way to be sure that your website is working hard for you. Let Luminary Digital’s team of Google Analytics-certified experts teach you how to track and analyze your metrics – we’re ready to dive deep into your data so that you can spend your time focusing on other parts of your business. Contact us today to get started!