Holiday sales can be beneficial for your business, but if you don’t track them properly, you do not realize how much they really count/matter. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: your business’s success depends on how much time and effort you’re willing to invest in. Whether your promos are done or not, it’s essential to take the time now to look deeper into your sales and see what this fourth quarter has done to your business.
Analytics are incredibly insightful tools available for you to improve your business by attracting new customers, improving your website experience, learning more about your customers, and so much more. At Bookmark, all of your analytics can be available for you to study and bring your website and business to the next level.
And if you allowed 2021 to get to December without tracking your analytics, or if you have been and want some quick tips before the busiest sale season of the year, this is the blog for you. So, toda y we’ll be diving headfirst into how you can track your success and why it’ll have your holiday end-sales on track for the new year!
What is Website Analytics?
Website analytics, simply put, is a way of collecting the data coming from your website. Everything from how many visitors you have, where they come from, what type of content they react well to and so on.
Now below, we’ve put together the 5 most common analytic tools that’ll help take your business to the next level:
Website traffic
This is how many customers you have coming in and out of your website. It’s important to know, especially when looking at how long you’ve had your website up for. This can be seen from the visitor’s country, language, and more!
Say it’s been a year, and you’re only getting 75 people coming and going from your website? Well, that’s relatively low but say you’ve been up only for 3 weeks and get 75 people?
That’s a decent amount. Website traffic is in regards to the number of people due to the website’s length of time or age. Ideally, you’d want your number of visits to grow as your website age increases.
Traffic sources
Don’t get confused here; we’re still talking about the movement, but not what you think. Usually, first-time visitors find your website from any links you have, rather than typing in your full URL. Your traffic sources are those links, and we have broken them down into four categories:
Device type
We’ve seen how far technology has spread and grown over the past 25 years alone. Now you can open any URL on your phone, iPad, or any device!
You can track what percentage of users are visiting your site through desktop or mobile browsers with analytics tools. Currently, 51.3% of are being loaded on mobile devices.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate would be when someone visits your website and then leaves without looking at any second pages/links or CTAs. This is why it’s called ‘bounce’. This can be calculated by the percentage you get over all of your traffic.
Many sites have bounce rates for a couple of reasons, such as:
Of course, this is dependent on what content your website is offering. However, on average, 20–70% is the number many websites face. Anything higher than 30% is a cause for concern.
Visitor Type
In all honesty, to get to the next level, you want to keep retaining your visitors and how many times they come back to your websites. This set of people/customers or even visitors could be called your core audience! These are the ones you should keep an eye on to bring up the number and nurture them and build a rapport with them.
Of course, your core audience is dependent on your site and what you’re offering, however on average, you should be looking at a return rate. Anything lower could mean your site is not as engaging as you’d need it to be.
Feel like your site is suffering, but you’re not sure why? No worries, head over to our blogs and check out our ‘6 Common Mistakes You Should Avoid With Your Website’ . There’s no reason for your website to fall when we’ve got the key for you!
How can these benefit your business?
To get to the next level, you’ll need a compelling analytics analysis. This can make the difference between running a highly trafficked website with a great conversion rate and a site that is forever in a vicious cycle to remain stagnant. Below, we’ve come up with a couple of critical points that we believe will change your analytics forever!
Key 1: Know your target audience
Don’t let a couple excellent reviews leave you to think that’s all who read and see your site…The best thing about web analytics is, it’ll help you create and find the right target audiences.
Your target audience gives you more info than you’ll ever need! Here’s where you’ll find what your niche expects from your site.
Finding the audience will help you create marketing materials that leave a warm smile on your customers faces. The suitable marketing campaigns to the right audiences will make conversions and take your website to the next level.
Key 2: Leverage where your target audience is from
We must use the Pareto Principle. For any who don’t know this principle, it’s simply the ! So roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.
So does that have to do with your web analytics? It’s too easy: you identify your top traffic sources and ensure that you are leveraging them to their maximum capacity. You want to use this info to ensure your website has its best interest!
By leveraging where your audience is coming from, you’ll find visitor behaviour . This can be evaluated by studying how long visitors stay on the site or specific pages.
Visitor Behavior opens your spectrum to which links were clicked or other actions the visitor took. Here’s why the Bounce rate is vital for us to use! High bounce rates can mean visitors are not interested in the page content or where it leads.
Key 3: Identify issues within your website
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Clear the junk out. Using these analytic tools properly will always include identifying any issues within your own website. And we’re not talking about bounce rate here either; we’re discussing exit pages.
Your goal should always be to minimize the percentage of this happening. To identify these, you want to do a report from time to time and look for:
- Any page intended to encourage the reader to explore your site further. A couple of examples would be your homepage, you’re about me page, and category pages, etc.
- Any and all pages that have an unanswered amount of high exit rate.
You can compare the results against old figures to see if anything has increased on those pages. In this report, you’ll be looking for the number of exits-this is your primary focus.
Once you have those numbers and results, think about the below issues your site may be suffering from:
- Your image files are too big. Solution: compress your image files
- Too much code/plugins. Solution: condense your coding
- An increased amount of traffic. Solution: invest in a better, higher-performing server
- Not making use of caching techniques
- Too many ads
While you’re sorting these problems out, we at Bookmark are here to offer business solutions with practical ways to build your website. to check out how we can get your website on the top of every search page.
Key 4: Set goals and landmarks
Setting goals and landmarks are imperative to your business like none other. Once more, we’ve said this before but for those of you in the back-stay consistent with your goals! In hindsight, a plan is setting that standard for what you are expecting for your site.
Unless you are running your business purely as a hobby, you should have an ideal end result in mind every time someone hits your site. It could be a sign-up to your email list or a sale- but there should be a specific goal. Of course, we small business owners want to have a large following, but if none or barely any of those visitors are converting, we’ve gained nothing.
With web analytics, companies like yours can create specific goals to track. Actively measuring goals allows your visitors to react faster to particular events through data. But don’t get too addicted to this without full knowledge of what circumstances and goals to track.
What are we saying?
Get specific in your goals and keep your eyes on these while you track. There are so many more ways to use analytics to take your business to the next level, like optimizing your site layout or monitoring your conversion rates.
In conclusion…
Help yourself and your business to get to the next level by ensuring you are using these and many more keys through analytics today. Get specific with your goals and watch your website traffic transform.
One more time for those who didn’t see it before, clear out any junk hindering your site within. Start doing more reports on your website and see how quickly you can decrease visitors on your pages. Use the 20/80 rule to identify your top traffic sources and ensure that you are leveraging them to their maximum capacity.
Yes, it’s possible for even your small business website that hasn’t been here long. And the best we can say is, know your target audience, get familiar with them and build your website to enhance their experience!
Not sure if you’ve been doing any of this? Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you’re lost with analytics!
We at Bookmark are your one-stop shop for solutions to all your website and small business needs! Catch us next week for more business tips and tricks, and all things business, eCommerce!
Originally published at https://www.bookmark.com on December 21, 2021.
