Unit 4

Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of data generated by users’ visiting and
interacting with a website. The purpose of web analytics is to measure user behavior, optimize
the website’s user experience and flow, and gain insights that help meet business objectives like
increasing conversions and sales.

There are tons of data you can collect to understand how people interact with your
website and identify opportunities for improvement. You can track overall traffic, bounce
rate, traffic sources, new and returning visitors, time spent on site, and much more.

The amount of data can be overwhelming at first. That’s why it’s important to identify a
few key metrics, particularly as you’re getting started. For example, you might start by
focusing on the bounce rate for a few key pages on your site. If visitors are quickly
bouncing from your homepage, then that indicates they’re not finding the information
they’re looking for quickly or easily enough. From there, you can identify possible next
steps, like redesigning your website navigation.

Let’s take a closer look at why web analytics is important below.

Importance Of Web Analytics

Web analytics is critical to the success of your business. It enables you to better
understand your site visitors and use those insights to improve the experience on your
site. For example, if you discover that the majority of users on your site are using a
mobile device, then you can focus on making your website more mobile-friendly.

Web analytics can also shape your content and SEO strategy. Looking at your top
viewed posts, you can begin to identify what types of content and topics perform best
with your audience. If you notice how-to WordPress tutorials make up the majority of
your top viewed posts, for example, then you might shift and narrow your focus from
definition articles about anything web-related to how-to WordPress tutorials. Or maybe
you look at your site’s traffic sources and notice that organic and email traffic are your
top drivers and paid channels are your lowest. In that case, you might shift resources to
invest more in your organic strategy than paid.

Now that we have an idea of what web analytics is and why it’s important, let’s look at
some key metrics you might track to measure progress against — and eventually meet
— overarching business objectives, like increasing website traffic, leads, and revenue.

Web Analytics Examples

1. Pageviews
2. Unique Pageviews
3. Sessions
 4. New Visitors
5. Returning Visitors
6. Traffic Sources
7. Bounce Rate

Pageviews

Pageviews are the total number of times a page was viewed on your site. A pageview
(or view) is counted when a page on your site is loaded by a browser. So if a person
were to view a page on your site and reload the page in their browser, that would count
as two views. If a person viewed one page, viewed a second page on your website, and
then returned to the original page, that would count as three views.

Pageviews can give you an idea of how popular a page on your site is, but it’s important
to look at this number in context with other metrics — something a traffic analysis tool can
help with. A page with a high number of views for a post isn’t necessarily popular since a
small group of visitors could be responsible for a lot of those views. A high number may
also indicate that a page was confusing and required visitors to return to it multiple
times.
Unique Pageviews

Unique pageviews is the total number of times a page was viewed by users in a single
session. In other words, a unique pageview aggregates pageviews that are generated
by the same user during a session (which we’ll define below). So if a person viewed the
same page twice (or more times) during an individual session, unique pageviews would
only count that pageview once.

Since this metric discounts instances in which a user reloads or visits the same page in
the same session, unique pageviews help you get a better understanding of how many
visitors are viewing pages on your site and how popular individual pages are.

Sessions

A session is a group of interactions — including not only page views, but activities such
as CTA clicks and events — that take place on your website within a given time frame.

The timeframe of a session varies by web analytics tool. For example, sessions in
Google Analytics and HubSpot’s traffic analytics tools last 30 minutes by default. A
session ends and a new session starts for a user when either A) there has been 30
minutes of inactivity and the user becomes active again, B) the clock strikes midnight, or
C) a user arrives via one traffic source, leaves, and then comes back via a different
source.

That means if a user lands on your site, leaves, and returns within 30 minutes, Google
Analytics and HubSpot will count it as one session, not two. On the other hand, if a user
is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more but then clicks on a CTA or takes another
action, Google Analytics and HubSpot will count it as two sessions, not one, even if the
user never left your site.

New Visitors
New visitors — also termed new users, unique visitors, or new visitor sessions,
depending on the web analytics tools — is the number of unique visitors on your website.

As the name implies, a new visitor is an individual who visits your site for the first time.
Healthy websites will show a steady flow of new visitors over time to make up for those
who lose interest.

These individuals are identified by a unique identifier. For example, when using
HubSpot, the HubSpot tracking code is installed on your site. Then, visitors on your site
are tracked by the cookie placed in their browser by this tracking code.

Two important notes to keep in mind: First, a single visitor can have multiple sessions
and pageviews on your site. Second, unique visitors is not an entirely accurate metric.
That’s because most web analytics tools use cookies to track visitors, which doesn’t
always distinguish new visitors from returning ones (which we’ll define below). For
example, if a person visits your site via their mobile phone and then on their personal
computer, they'll be counted as new visitors on both occasions.

Returning Visitors

Returning visitors (or users) is the number of visitors on your website who have visited
before. Not all web analytics tools include this metric, but some — including Google
Analytics — do. In Google Analytics’s Audience reports, you can look at behaviors to
see the ratio of new to returning users on your site.

Looking at both new and returning visitors metrics are great for getting a sense of how
well you're retaining your visitors, and how effective you are in attracting net new visitors
at the top of the funnel.

Your ratio of new to returning visitors will depend on several factors including your
industry, how long you’ve been around, and whether you offer incentives to return to
your site. But, if you’re an established website that’s seeing returning (or new) visitors
top 80% of your traffic, attempt to balance this out by attracting more new visitors or
retaining old ones.

Again, keep in mind that this metric won’t be completely accurate if the web analytics
tool uses cookies to track visitors.

Traffic Sources

Traffic sources show where your site visitors are coming from. Like visitor information,
this metric is usually collected via the tracking code on your site.
The number of traffic sources you can track will vary depending on the web analytics
tool. HubSpot’s traffic analytics tools track multiple categories, including:

 Organic Search
 Referrals
 Organic Social
 Email Marketing
 Paid Search
 Paid Social
 Direct traffic

Ideally, you want to increase all sources of traffic. But, your biggest focus should
be organic search, which is traffic that comes from non-paid search results in search
engines like Google. This source has the potential to drive huge amounts of traffic to
your site. Plus, improving this channel often improves other channels, like referrals and
social.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing a single
page. You can look at bounce rate as a site-wide metric or a page-level metric. At the
page level, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that started on the page and did
not move to another page on your site.

Generally, a bounce rate of 40% or lower is considered good, 40% to 70% is average,
and anything above 70% is considered high.

If your site’s overall bounce rate is high, it might help to identify individual pages with
high bounce rates. A high average page bounce rate might indicate there’s a problem
with the page’s loading time, or that external links are not opening in a new tab or
window, among other reasons.

To learn what actions you can take to reduce bounce rate, check out our 6 Steps to Reduce Your
Bounce Rate.
Web Analytics Best Practices

Many aspects of web analytics are specific to your business: what metrics you track,
how you build out reports, what tools you use. But there are some best practices to help
anyone collect, analyze, and report website data more effectively. Let’s look at a few.

1. Pick metrics that align with your business objectives.

Focusing on only one or two metrics won’t provide enough insight into how visitors are
interacting with your site — but tracking every single metric might provide toomuch
information to be actionable.

To make sure you’re focusing on the right metrics, start by plotting your business
objectives. Think about what the top priorities are for your website. Do you want to lower
your site bounce rate? Are you looking to attract more new visitors, or better retain
existing ones?

Once you have one or more objectives in mind, come up with specific strategies you’ll
implement to achieve these objectives, such as fixing broken links and images,
changing your site’s copy, or better optimizing for your mobile audience, which probably
makes up around half of your traffic.

You’re now ready to narrow down what metrics will help you track your progress for
achieving your goals and ultimately your business objectives.

2. Use data to drive decision-making.

After collecting your data, determining whether or not you met your goals is only the first
step. The next — and arguably more important — step is using that data to test,
experiment, and make changes on your site.

For example, say you identified some high-value content, like your Services and Pricing
page, through user testing and feedback in your web design process. However, these
pages aren’t getting much traffic.

In this case, you might move the navigation links for these pages to a more visible part
of your site, or implement SEO measures on these pages to rank higher and capture
more organic search traffic.

3. Don’t limit your focus to traffic.

Understanding and reporting traffic data — including pageviews, top traffic sources, and
most viewed pages — is important. But it’s just one piece of your website performance.
High traffic doesn’t necessarily mean success.

For example, if you’re getting millions of pageviews but no conversions, then you’re
probably not meeting all your business objectives. Or, if new visitors consistently make
up a high proportion of your traffic, consider why that might be and how you can attract
return visitors more effectively.

4. Always pair data with insights.

If you report that your website received 1 million unique pageviews and 400,000 new
visitors this month, that doesn’t mean all that much. Reporting only the numbers
provides an incomplete picture of your website performance. For all we know, these
numbers could indicate:

 an increase from last month.

 a decrease from last month.
 little to no change in pageviews or visitors month-over-month.
  an increase last month, but a major year-over-year decrease.

That’s why you must pair your data with insights. If you instead report that your website
got 1 million unique pageviews, which exceeded last month’s unique pageviews by 20%
and also showed a significant increase year over year, then the data is much more
meaningful and actionable to you and fellow stakeholders.

5. Look at your data in context.

While collecting and analyzing data, think about it in context. What variables or larger
forces could be impacting the numbers? For example, algorithm updates, seasonality,
and bots can all have a major impact on your traffic and other metrics.
Imagine that a few pages on your site saw major spikes in traffic. These posts weren’t
updated recently, so you look where this traffic came from. If the traffic mostly came
from one country where you usually don’t see much traffic, this was likely malicious bot
traffic, which accounts for a quarter of all internet traffic.

Viewing your data in context can help you better understand, analyze, gain insight, and
make informed decisions with your data.

6. Share and ask for feedback from stakeholders.

As an analyst, you want to provide information to stakeholders in a way that is
understandable and actionable. You also want to ask for information and ideas from
these stakeholders. They can provide valuable feedback on how they use the data,
what else they want to see or understand about their users or website, and how they
think they can improve the user experience or other issues the data
Web Analytics Tools

Measuring organizational success requires more than one metric — and more than one
tool. Let’s take a look at three web analytics tools you could use together.

HubSpot Marketing Analytics & Dashboard Software

With HubSpot’s free marketing analytics and dashboard software, you can measure the
performance of all your marketing assets — from website and landing pages, to emails,
blog posts, social media accounts, calls-to-action, and more — from one dashboard.

You’re able to track your customers’ complete lifecycle, measure traffic overall or on a
page-by-page basis, and add multiple reports to your dashboard so you’re tracking your
most critical metrics in one easy-to-access place. You can even break down reports by
user characteristics for more fine-grained analysis.

HubSpot’s free tool is ideal for anyone looking for built-in analytics, reports, and
dashboards so they can make smarter, data-driven decisions.

What we like: Analytics is fully integrated into everything you do in HubSpot, ensuring
you always have the right data available when you need it. There’s no more digging
through spreadsheets or datastreams — with HubSpot, everything is accessible and
actionable, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned expert.
Google Analytics
Used by over 28 million websites, Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics
tool. With it, you can track pageviews, unique pageviews, bounce rate, traffic channels,
user retention, average session duration, sessions by country, sessions by device, and
more. You can also build reports about your audience, acquisition channels,
engagement, and conversions.
Understanding the value, flexibility, and popularity of Google Analytics, some platforms
offer unique integrations with this tool. Analytics Amplifier, for example, is a HubSpot
app that allows users to match HubSpot customer behaviors — including “hot leads”
and “deal amount” — with real-time Google Analytics data.
If you want to learn more about this tool, check out our Ultimate Guide to Google
Analytics. However, the sheer amount of metrics, reports, and integrations that can be
tracked or created using Google Analytics might be overwhelming. Users without SEO
or technical expertise, like content creators, may find it difficult and prefer a Google
Analytics alternative.
What we like: Google Analytics is unmatched in popularity. It gives website owners an
all-encompassing view of their site activity, and is relatively easy to set up and link to
any live site. Plus, Google Analytics offers many powerful capabilities for free.
Crazy Egg
Used by over 300,000 users, Crazy Egg is a unique web analytics tool that provides
heatmaps, scroll maps, and other visual reports to show you exactly how your visitors
are interacting with your site. Thanks to Crazy Egg's tracking code, you’ll be able to
watch what visitors are hovering over and clicking on in real-time via heatmaps.

Crazy Egg also offers comprehensive A/B testing so you can test various content
variables like color, copy, and content placement, to see how it affects the user
experience and conversions. This makes Crazy Egg an ideal alternative or supplement
to Google Analytics for users interested in conversion optimization.

What we like: Crazy Egg is a user-friendly tool for conducting heatmap and scroll map
testing, A/B testing, and screen recordings of user interactions. These are great means
to better understand users in qualitative and quantitative ways, and gain insights to
improve the user experience on your site.

Web Analytics API

A web analytics API is a specific type of application programming interface (API) that can help
automate reporting, manage how data is processed, and provide deeper insights into your data.

For example, Google Analytics offers several APIs that you can use to automate
complex reporting and configuration tasks. One such API is the Google Analytics
Reporting API. With this API, you can build custom dashboards to display your Google
Analytics data, automate complex reporting tasks to save time (like getting data in two
date ranges with a single request), and integrate your GA data with other business
applications.
Another popular example is Chartbeat’s Real-Time API. This API consists of data that is
updated every three seconds so you can see how your visitors are interacting with your
content in real-time. You can use this data to improve audience engagement, inform
editorial decisions, and increase readership, which is why Chartbeat is used by bigwig
news organizations including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Importance of Web Analytics

We need Web Analytics to assess the success rate of a website and its
associated business. Using Web Analytics, we can −

 Assess web content problems so that they can be rectified

 Have a clear perspective of website trends
 Monitor web traffic and user flow
 Demonstrate goals acquisition
 Figure out potential keywords
 Identify segments for improvement
 Find out referring sources

Google analytics helps you to track and measure visitors, traffic sources,
goals, conversion, and other metrics (as shown in the above image). It
basically generates reports on −

 Audience Analysis
 Acquisition Analysis
 Behavior Analysis
 Conversion Analysis

Let us discuss each one of them in detail.

Audience Analysis

As the name suggests, audience analysis gives you an overview of the

audience who visit your site along with their session history, page-views,
bounce rate, etc. You can trace the new as well as the returning users along
with their geographical locations. You can track −

 The age and gender of your audience under Demographics.

 The affinity reach and market segmentation under Interests.
 Language and location under Geo.
 New and returning visitors, their frequency, and engagement under Behavior.
 Browsers, Operating systems, and network of your audience in Technology.
 Mobile device info under Mobile.
  Custom variable report under Custom. This report shows the activity by custom modules
that you created to capture the selections.
 Benchmarking channels, locations, and devices under Benchmarking. Benchmarking
allows you to compare your metrics with other related industries. So, you can plot what
you need to incur in order to overtake the market.
 Flow of user activity under Users flow to see the path they took on your website.
Acquisition Analysis

Acquisition means ‘to acquire.’ Acquisition analysis is carried out to find out
the sources from where your web traffic originates. Using acquisition
analysis, you can −

 Capture traffic from all channels, particular source/medium, and from referrals.
 Trace traffic from AdWords (paid search).
 See traffic from search engines. Here, you can see Queries, triggered landing pages, and
geographical summary.
 Track social media traffic. It helps you to identify networks where your users are
engaged. You can see referrals from where your traffic originates. You can also have a
view of your hub activity, bookmarking sites follow-up, etc. In the same tab, you can
have a look at your endorsements in details. It helps you measure the impact of social
media on your website.
 See which plug-ins gave you traffic.
 Have a look at all the campaigns you built throughout your website with detailed
statistics of paid/organic keywords and the cost incurred on it.
Behavior Analysis

Behavior analysis monitors users’ activities on a website. You can find

behavioral data under the following four segments −

 Site Content − It shows how many pages were viewed. You can see the detailed
interaction of data across all pages or in segments like content drill-down, landing pages,
and exit pages. Content drill-down is breaking up of data into sub-folders. Landing
page is the page where the user lands, and exit page is where the user exits your site.
You can measure the behavioral flow in terms of content.
 Site Speed − Here, you can capture page load time, execution speed, and performance
data. You can see how quickly the browser can parse through the page. Further, you can
measure page timings, user timings, and get speed suggestion. It helps you to know
where you are lagging.
 Site Search − It gives you a full picture of how the users search across your site, what
they normally look for, and how they arrive at a particular landing page. You can analyze
what they search for before landing on your website.
 Events − Events are visitors’ actions with content, which can be traced independently.
Example − downloads, sign up, log-in, etc.
Conversion Analysis

Conversion is a goal completion or a transaction by a user on your website.

For example, download, checkout, buy, etc. To track conversions in
analytics, you need to define a goal and set a URL that is traceable.

 Goals − Metrics that measure a profitable activity that you want the user to complete.
You can set them to track the actions. Each time a goal is achieved, a conversion is added
to your data. You can observe goal completion, value, reverse path, and goal flow.
 Ecommerce − You can set ecommerce tracking to know what the users buy from your
website. It helps you to find product performance, sale performance, transactions, and
purchase time. Based on these data, you can analyze what can be beneficial and what can
incur you loss.
 Multi-channel funnels − Multi-channel funnels or MCF reports the source of
conversion; what roles the website plays, referrals’ role in that conversion; and what all
slabs did when users pass through landing page to conversion. For example, a user
searched for a query on Google search page, he visited the website, but did not convert.
Later on, he directly typed your website name and made a purchase. All these activities
can be traced on MCF.
 Attribution − Attribution modeling credits sales and conversions to touch points in
conversion tracking. It lets you decide what platforms or strategy or module is the best
for your business. Suppose a person visited your website through AdWords ad and made
no purchase. A month later, he visits via a social platform and again does not buy. Third
time, he visited directly and converted. Here, the last interaction model will credit direct
for the conversion, whereas first interaction model will assign credit to paid medium.
This way, you can analyze what module should be credited for a conversion.

Future of web analytics

Web Analytics - Emerging Analytics

You need to leverage data to drive insights in order to learn customers’
behavior on your website. There is nothing new in it. What alters the game
is emerging analytics trends in Social Media, E-commerce, and Mobile, as
these are new game changers in digital world.

Social Media Analytics

Social Media Analytics comprise of gathering data from social media

platforms and analyzing it to derive information to make business decisions.
It provides powerful customer insight to uncover sentiments across online
sources. You tend to take control of Social Media Analytics in order to predict
customers’ behavior, discover patterns and trends, and make quick decisions
to improve online reputation. Social Media Analytics also let you identify
primary influencers within specific network channels. Some of the popular
social media analytics tools are discussed below.

Google Social Analytics

It is a free tool that lets you add social media results to your analysis report.
You get to know what is in air about your business. How many people
interacted with your website through social media and how many liked and
shared your content.

SumAll
It combines Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus into one dashboard to give
you an overall view of what people are talking about you on social media.

Facebook Insights
Facebook plays a major role in your marketing campaign. You need to
familiarize yourself with Facebook data to mark a flag. You need to set up a
page for your business to get the insights. It gives you information about
who visited your page, saw your post, liked your page, and shared it (as
shown in the following image).
Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics show how many impressions each tweet received, what is
your engagement status, and when were you on peak (see the image given
below).

E-commerce Analytics

Business owners need to survive and thrive among tough competition. They
have to become big decision makers in order to survive in the market. This
is where Web Analytics play a critical role.
E-commerce Analytics let you figure out customers’ acquisition, users’
behavior, and conversion. In Google Analytics, you can get relevant
information about your volume of sales, product with revenue, and sources
of conversion occurred. You need to keep all this information to find out
where your business stands and to boost e-commerce sales, generate leads,
and enhance brand awareness.

Mobile Analytics

Mobiles have emerged as one of the most significant tools in the past two
decades. It changes the way people communicate and innovate. This has led
to marketing driven by mobile apps.
Mobile apps have proved easy to access and engaging. Webmasters and
online business makers need to take support of mobile apps to make their
way perfect. Once you are done with making a mobile app, you’ll need to
acquire new users, engage with them, and earn revenue. For this, you need
mobile analytics. It helps marketers to measure their apps better. For
example −

 How many people are using your app

 How to optimize user experience
 How to prioritize
 What operating system to focus on
 How to visualize navigation path, etc.