Marketer’s Guide to Website Analytics that Actually Matter

Platforms like Google Analytics can present an extensive array of data points and reports that can lead to information overload for anyone. As a marketing professional, it’s essential to not only understand what each of these analytics and reports mean but also know the best way to communicate the information to Executives. In this blog, I’ll walk through the critical website analytics that, when optimized, can lead to stronger traffic, high-quality conversions, and more sales.

Starting Your Analysis

When beginning your analysis, you want to keep in mind the period that you are evaluating. If your goal is to maintain your website, then look at a broader span to evaluate – like every quarter. For organizations that are consistency dropping large campaigns and need to accelerate growth, monthly or bi-weekly evaluations are recommended. For sites over three years old, I recommend comparing the period from this year to last year in addition to month over month, to better track growth.

Audience Acquisition

Users and New Users – Each individual has a unique ID through a tracking code that is shared via cookies. By looking at total users and new users, you can see the broad count of individuals viewing your site.

Sessions – Sessions are the page views that a user makes during a period of engagement on your site. This can be analyzed through a total count or session duration.

Audience Behavior

Bounce Rate – This percentage is created when a user lands on a page on your site and exits without clicking onto another page. The lower your bounce rate is, the better you are doing at keeping a user engaged on your website.

Page/ Session – This looks at how many pages are viewed from the time they entered your site, to the time they left. Depending on the depth of content on the website, you’ll want for this to be a higher percentage, so viewers are staying on your site longer and maximizing their time spent on the site.

Average Session – The average session takes into consideration the total duration of all sessions and dividing it by the total number of sessions during that same time frame.

Impactful Reports

Behavior Flow – This shows the path that a viewer takes when on your website. From this report, you can discover what content is most engaging and optimize the path with calls to action.

Top Performing Pages – Similar to behavior flow, top-performing pages show what pages are getting the most sessions. Within this report, you can see total page views, unique page views, sessions, bounce rate, and average time spent on-page.

Channels – This report categorizes traffic based on how users got to your website. Common channel avenues are organic search, direct, display, social, paid search, referral, and email.

Offer Conversions – Every piece of content on your site should have a call to action. You can track conversions on your offers by viewing the total hits or downloads on a page, track form completions within your marketing automation tool, or even call records within our CRM.

Paid Media Conversions – By setting up tracking codes for a paid media campaign, a search engine or display advertisement captures information on the user based on IP. To accurately track paid media, set up goals within your analytics platform for volume, and monitor the quality of conversions through your marketing automation tool.

Social Media Network Conversions ­– Social media channels often house their own analytics tools, but that can only give you one slice of the story. By setting up your channels within your analytics tools, you can track the volume of conversions from sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Your website should be more than just a billboard for your product or service, but a demand generation hub. Sites should present information in a captivating way to a variety of audience maturity. By better understanding these types of marketing analytics and reports, you are on your way to optimize and enhance how your site operates.

This blog was written by Maryann Werner, Sr. Portfolio Marketer and B2B Marketing Consultant who empowers businesses with forward thinking strategies to strengthen their brand, enable their customers, and advance in the modern marketplace.