Analytics are reporting tools that allow the user to view key statistics on the performance of their site. These statistics have expanded significantly since 2005 and now include some advanced data sets such as real time, demographics, social media, attribution, multichannel and cross-device data.
There are many tools available to track your digital data and these can be broken down into several areas. Five of the most common of these here:
1● Web analytics
Web analytics is the tool that we are usually referring to when discussing analytics. It is the tool that collects and reports on all of the key data on the performance of our website. There are many tools available with very strong offerings and it is important to consider your needs when selecting which
tool to move forward with.
The standard data you should expect to get from your web analytics tool includes the following: ● Page views, visits, unique visitors, bounce rate, session duration. ● New versus returning visitors: users who have visited before or not. ● Language and location: helpful for geographical purposes. ● Demographics: data on the user’s high-level information such as age. ● Device type, make and model: technical data on your device hardware. ● Browser, resolution and operating system: technical data on your device software. ● Traffic source: which pages people came from.
2● Social analytics
Social analytics refers to the tools used to monitor the effectiveness of social media. Social media itself is a relatively young channel and so the tools used continue to evolve. There are, however, some very clear metrics that should be monitored to determine the effectiveness of your social strategy. They are content and promotion.
In order to understand how your content is resonating with your audience you need to have visibility of how users are engaging with this content, what topics are the most popular and to whom, when users engage and on what device. All of these questions are vital if you are to understand how to deliver content that will interest your customers and prospects.
Some of the key metrics you should be considering here are as follows: ● Reach: the total users mentioning your brand plus their followers. ● Engagement: the people taking an action on your content. ● Average engagement rate: the average rate of people who took action versus people who saw your content. ● Impressions: the number of times your content has been seen. ● Visits: the total number of times people have been to your site/page. ● Unique visitors: the total number of individuals who have been to your site/page. ● Bounce rate: people arriving and then leaving without visiting another page. ● Click-through rate: the percentage of people who see your content and click through to the end location. ● Conversion rate: the percentage of people who buy versus those who arrived on your site or began a purchase journey. ● Sales: total number of sales ● Response rate: the percentage of people who have in some way responded to your content. ● Mentions: the number of times that your brand has been mentioned. ● Followers: the number of followers you have on any or all networks. ● Buzz: combination of a number of factors that suggest how popular you are right now. ● Share of voice: the number of conversations about you versus your competition. ● Sentiment: reviewing the types of message about you for positive and negative sentiment.
3● SEO analytics
SEO analytics is the method of tracking the signals that dictate your overall organic search performance. Without using specific tools for this purpose, you will be blind to your achievements or risks within this space. This is an area that is often overlooked or misunderstood due to the rather secretive nature of the channel. Search engines have long hidden their methods from public view and have even removed SEO metrics from analytics tools altogether. For example, Google Analytics gradually increased the percentage of ‘not provided’ keyword results in its organic search metrics to the point where almost nothing could be gained from looking at this data. Also, simply searching Google for your site may return a ranking but this is just one ranking for one term on one day and is subject to significant change. That result may also be affected by your previous behavior through a cookie. Specific SEO tools are therefore needed and these can report on SEO signals. When combined these give a powerful view of your overall SEO performance and the areas to focus on to improve performance.
SEO metrics that can be monitored include: ● inbound links (or backlinks) and link quality; ● search visibility; ● crawl errors; ● site speed; ● broken links; ● rank tracking; ● competitor backlinks; ● brand monitoring.
*** Course: SEO Basics
4● user experience
User experience tools include everything from ensuring that the user is having a pleasant experience to optimizing conversion, and more. The tools in this area are varied and can offer a great deal of insight on behaviors. Some of the outputs are less quantifiable than the other analytics tools as they will show
only the behavior not the cause or intent. For example, if you are viewing a heatmap of user behavior and you see that your new homepage design has led to more users focusing on your secondary content, and fewer on your primary content, then you can decide that the change has had a negative effect and choose to revert the design to the previous version. You will not, however, know whether this was caused by the new content that you have released, the colors, layout or even macro factors such as what
is in the news. You also will not know what the users intended when they arrived. Perhaps the new design performs better for different organic keywords and so you are now attracting a different user group to your site and they are more interested in the secondary content. User experience tools give you the opportunity to test different theories and optimize towards these to create the best possible outcome for the user and your goals.
5● tag management.
Tag management is a solution that is implemented by many larger organizations in order to make the implementation of other systems easier and to solve some issues that tags create. Tags are pieces of code that you put into your website code in order to fulfil certain tasks such as monitoring traffic or understanding visitor data. Tag management is therefore not a pure analytics tool itself but is worth looking at alongside the above tools, as it should be considered simultaneously.
