Imagine a situation where a doctor needs to provide services to a patient he hasn’t met, talked to, and with no information about what the patient’s problem is.
This is a situation that is impossible to deal with and even if attempted, it would most likely lead to a wrong diagnosis. Similarly, this is the same situation that webmasters and website owners find themselves in.
What if we could find a better way to understand our client’s needs and behavior when they visit our websites? Couldn’t we be able to serve them better, provide the services they need as we increase our leads?
Let’s look at this more closely.
Web Analytics: Why are they important?
There are different applications to which this concept will be relevant, but the true importance depends on the applicability in your circumstances.
Site statistics or website analytics are terms we come across from time to time, for some on a daily basis. As long as you own an online business, or have any relevant presence online, you will have to understand what these analytics are, and most importantly why you need to care.
“Website analytics refers to the measurement, analysis, and reporting of internet usage statistics, in order to understand and come up with relevant ways of optimizing a website to make it more productive.”
In the broadest perspective, website analytics refers to the measurement, analysis, and reporting of internet usage statistics, in order to understand and come up with relevant ways of optimizing a website to make it more productive.
To put this in the simplest form, web analytics is all about the information on the following:
- Who comes to your website
- How did they get to your website
- What did they do once they were on your website
- Where did they go from your website
At the moment there are lots of applications available that provide in-depth information on web analytics. The core ideas that webmasters and website owners are interested in will in most cases be on information regarding the kind of traffic that goes to your website.
Why you need to invest in web analytics
What we are getting at so far, is that through web analytics, you get to interact with your users on a higher level. You get to understand them better.
You might not get that face-to-face interaction with them, or interact with them through some other form of communication like contact forms or chats, but you do get to have a deeper understanding of what works for them.
With this information, you are better placed to tweak your website accordingly, so that you make it easier to appeal to them, and over time, keep them spending more time on your site.
A lot of people are after traffic, but it would all be a waste if you get useless traffic, traffic that yields no fruits. If you have a terrible website, you might get all the traffic you want, but in the long run, this will be counterproductive, and this will hurt your indexing on search engine algorithms.
The most important thing you need to know about this process is that it delivers information to you, not just about your visitors and how they relate to your website, but also about your website.