Understanding your Analytics is key to understanding how well your website is working for both your company and your users. This article is focused on understanding the key basic elements which provide you with an overview of how effective your website is.
- Sessions versus users
People often believe that having a large amount of web traffic is good however it’s not always beneficial. Before you can make this judgement, you need to know what type of visitors you want to attract – returning visitors or new visitors?
The amount of sessions and the number of users differ. Users are the individual people whereas sessions are the amount of times your website has been reached. For example – John, June and Jackie all go onto your website but John is the only one who returns. You will have 3 users and 4 sessions.
Depending on where you are in your marketing plan will help to determine the majority of sessions you want. [Think this first lineneeds re-wording – doesn’t make sense to me – MW] For example, if you are running an awareness campaign you would expect that the number of users would equal or closely match the amount of sessions, and those users will be brand new.
If you are running an up-sell or retention campaign, you would expect the number of sessions to be drastically higher than users and the majority of users will be returning visitors.
- Bounce rate
Your bounce rate refers to the amount of web traffic that has “bounced” – this means that they have landed on a page of your website (most commonly the homepage) and not navigated to any other page. They have reviewed the information on that page and made the decision to leave.
A typical bounce rate is approximately 30-40% however the lowest you can get this the better. For example, the best bounce rate we have ever seen to date is 4.06%!
The bounce rate is important as it allows you to understand the quality of visitors that are being directed to your site. There are multiple reasons why the percentage may be high, including:
- Advert to content relevancy – if the page they land on isn’t relevant to the advert or search terms they clicked on then they haven’t been directed to what they want and will go elsewhere.
- Poor user navigation – if they can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they’ll go elsewhere.
- No engaging features or calls to action – give them a reason to stay on your site. If they have read an article, follow it up similar articles or direct them to a similar page.
- Important to understand though that if a visitor gets what they want from the landing page eg a telephone number or address, they can also affect the results negetively [or words to that effect]
- Behaviour flow
Tied in with the bounce rate, the behaviour flow helps you to understand how people are navigating through your site. This will be broken down into pages. For example, if the majority of users have landed on your homepage and then gone into case studies and then contact page – you know that building brand credibility within the about page is really important to your customer.
Behaviour flows can also highlight where traffic is dropping off and which pages aren’t getting much attention. With this knowledge, you can determine whether the page a) can’t be found or b) isn’t relevant to your audience.
- Channels
The channels tool shows you where your visitors have come from and is usually split into the following categories:
- Organic
- Direct
- Social
- Referral
This is an important tool as it can show how and where you need to improve and where you are doing well – especially if your conversion rates are low and your bounce rate is high – as it will highlight which areas of your marketing strategy require attention and improvement. If you aren’t seeing all 4 of these categories then it may be that you don’t have significant presence in that area.
- Desktop versus mobile
This is actually one of the most important reports you’ll need. Understanding your market behaviour including who, when and how they use your site, will allow you to market to them better.
If the majority of your users are using a mobile device (this includes tablets) then you must ensure that your site is fully optimised. To name a few, this can include:
- Image optimisation
- Page load speed
- Amount of text per page
- Accessibility of menus and information
To put it simply, your website needs constant attention to ensure it is working as you need it to. Your website can be a large investment and it’s vital that you see a return. Although the points in this post are just the tip of the iceberg, there are massive amounts of information available to you that provide an insight into how you can better optimise your website for conversion.
If you want to know more about your analytics or how you can use your data to improve your marketing campaigns or conversions, contact a member of the team today on 0121 321 2828 or email studio@creativeinsight.co.uk.
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