Web Analytics Basics

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Definition

Web analytics is a term that applies to all forms of online measurement. Generally, we use it to refer to analytics tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Omniture. But there are many more forms of web analytics that allow you to understand exactly how people engage with your website. We’ll focus purely on Google Analytics, because it’s free to use and it’s the most-used web analytics platform on the web.

Benefits of web analytics

Web analytics allows you to understand three things:

• How people find your website
• How people engage with your website
• What your website’s strengths and weaknesses are

This is incredibly valuable information, which allows you to improve your website, as well as improve your digital marketing efforts. Without web analytics, we’re just guessing what works and what doesn’t.

Web analytics allows us to make informed decisions based on actual data. That’s what sets digital marketing apart from other classical marketing activities.

The key benefits of analytics are that it enables you to:

• Get closer to the customer
• Accurately gauge user experience
• Gain insights from real customer experience

Google Analytics interface

The Google Analytics interface shows you the top-level metrics of your website’s performance in the last 30 days. Here, you can see:

• The total amount of sessions
• The amount of users that have visited your site
• How many pages they viewed
• The amount of pages a visitor looks at, on average
• How much time they spend on the site
• The average bounce rate