What are website analytics and why should I care?

Website Analytics are an integral part of a successful online ecommerce strategy. We discussed their place in website design in our 101 series here.
But what exactly are website analytics? Everything a customer does on your website can be tracked; the clicks they make, the time spent on a web page, which page they discovered first and which one they decided to leave your site from. Just as knowing the number of customers and how they are interacting with the various products in a bricks-and-mortar store is crucial to high sales, understanding your analytics and using the information to make changes to inform your continual website design and development will boost sales.

Why Do I Need To Care About Analytics?
Effectively harnessing the power of analytics will do a number of important things for your business website design:

• Increase Conversions
  Increasing the number of people who land on your website and then convert into paying customers is one of the main drivers of using analytics. Understanding what is working and what is not and changing in response to that information will maximise your website design towards greater sales.
• Respond To Market Changes
  By constantly analysing the way your customers are interacting with your website you will become aware of changes in the marketplace directly. Seasonal changes will be the first trend you will notice. When a product is popular or declining, the analytics will show you, giving you an opportunity to respond to the market by promoting a popular product or discontinuing orders in anticipation of a trend. Your website design company may offer analysis of these changes.
• Identify Important Pages
  There is not the time or resources to completely optimize every page or every product of an online store. Analytics will show you which pages you need to focus your attention on.
  Getting a handle on your website analytics will allow you to work closely with your website design company on maximising its potential.

Types Of Analytics

There are many products available that can provide you with analytics about your website’s performance; some of them free, some of them paid, some easy to use, off-the-shelf options and others fully customisable. What you choose will depend on your needs and budget.

• Analytics built into your website
  Every website has a basic set of analytics that are free and give you information about site traffic, location of visitors and time they spent on each page. If you have an average size user base and want a basic understanding of what pages are popular on your website and who your customers are, this will be enough. The interfaces can often be a bit clunky to use and understand and most of the information is displayed in simple graphs or tables.
• Google Analytics
  Easy to implement and navigate, Google Analytics is one of the leading analytics tools because it provides a wide range of potential services from very basic information to split testing and customer flow. If you have a large user base and want to track more detailed information to improve your conversions, Google Analytics is a fantastic free and intuitive tool to use. To get the most from Google Analytics, sign up for an explanatory course or recruit an expert to show you what it is capable of.
• Paid products
  Other products that provide greater in-depth analysis of your customers movements on your website are available for purchase. One such product is Kiss Metrics. These products provide you with detailed information about your customers’ movements, including eye movement. If you have a large number of visitors and want to work out ways to improve conversions, these analytics will be a good investment. A small increase in your conversions across various points of your sales process can improve your revenues by thousands of dollars.
• Custom analytics
  Some web design services also provide a custom analytics report designed and sent to you directly with specific information important to your customers and your business. We offer this service at Complete Cloud to help our customers filter the large amount of data and make it relevant to them. Let us know if you would like more information about this.