Why Web Analytics Are Important To Digital Marketers

Why should digital marketers understand web analytics?

Web analytics are important as a digital marketer because “to measure is to know”. If you do not measure your marketing efforts, then how do you know what is doing well and what isn’t? If you know the performance of your marketing efforts, you can act on what campaigns need improvement. It is also great to know what channels are working well so you can invest more effort and money in that specific campaign.

Web analytics provides us with valuable insights

into the specifics of our digital marketing strategy, revealing exactly how well each of our different marketing channels is performing. This makes it easy to compare them with one another to find the right mix of marketing efforts to implement into your digital marketing strategy. Web analytics takes the guessing aspect out, because we can look at our web analytics dashboard and see EXACTLY what is going on. We can determine whether our overall traffic is higher or lower than last month, how many users accessed specific web pages on your website, and the average time a user spends on your website.

Web analytics also gives digital marketers insight into what behaviors and actions from a user lead to conversions (the key goal of a website). Uncovering this insight is what brings a digital marketer value to their employer, because it is sound evidence about how our marketing efforts are performing. Insight from web analytics gives us the information we need to make educated and efficient decisions to achieve the goal of our website.

What are the key metrics that web analytics help to uncover?

Audience

The first key metric we will discuss is audience, which is the people who are coming to your website. Using web analytics, we can uncover where our audience is from using their IP address, which is a digital address that gives us information about where the user is located, so we can learn what countries and cities our viewers are from. Additional information that can be accessed about our audience (if they opt in to cookies/share their data…) includes metrics such as age range, gender, interests, and device type (mobile, tablet, or desktop).

Acquisition

The next key metric is acquisition, which are reports that give tons of good data about how your audience ARRIVES at your website. There are some general channels that a user will go through to access your website. The obvious way is called “direct”, which is when the visitor types your URL directly into their search bar or uses a bookmark. Some other important channels include organic search (website comes up from keywords on a search engine), paid search (“sponsored” websites on a search engine), email (user opens an email sent from your team), and referral (a user follows a link to your website from another website).

Engagement

Next is engagement, which measures how connected our visitors are with our website. Some engagement analytics are simple, such as “views”. Views are how many pages on a website a user has viewed. Other engagement analytics are more specific, such as how long someone spends on your website, also known as average engagement time. This is a great piece of data to see how connected the user is to your website, but a good average time varies based on what type of website you have. E-commerce websites want the experience to be easy and quick (short average engagement times). Content websites want users to spend time on their website so they can show users ads (long average engagement time). Other important engagement analytics to track are sessions and visits. Sessions happen when users enter, leave, or haven’t interacted with the website in 30 minutes. Visits are when a user goes to the website and does not interact with it.

Conversions

Last is our most important metric, CONVERSIONS! We have micro-conversions (actions that lead to our goal) and macro-conversions (actions that achieve our goal). We love these as digital marketers because it means the user has achieved the goal of the website.  For e-commerce websites, this means the user has bought our product or service. For information websites, this means the user has downloaded the desired content we want to share. We can also designate specific events as conversions, which will tell us the percentage of users who viewed an item, added an item to the cart, and made a purchase from all the users on the website. This is important to see how far our users are in the marketing funnel. Are they just finding out about us and skimming our website, or are they on the verge of making a purchase?

How do web analytics identify which of your digital marketing efforts are succeeding?

Find the steps that lead to a conversion

Web analytics uncover what specific steps the user took that led to our conversion (the desired outcome of our website). One example is an online shopping transaction. As digital marketers, we want to see what events the consumers went through to uncover the buyer's journey they took. Did they start by clicking on a monthly newsletter that advertised a sale we have, or did the user see an influencer showcase the article of clothing on social media, which prompted them to follow a link to buy the item?

Find EXACTLY what campaigns/channels are performing well

Using web analytics, we can determine which marketing campaigns bring users to our website and compare them to see which ones are performing better. For example, we can look at our web analytics and see that more traffic that ends in conversions is coming to the website from paid search versus organic search. We can then assess the situation and determine that we should put more money and effort into paid search because it is having more success and has a higher conversion rate. We can easily do this in Google Analytics by using the segmenting feature, which allows us to compare data that leads to important insight on your different marketing channels, such as comparing what kind of device users used (mobile, tablet, or desktop), or what geographical regions the users are from.