Website Analytics 101: Your Path to Online Excellence

In the digital world, where data is king and insights are the currency of success, understanding that the key to building a high-converting website is by mastering the art of website analytics. 

Sure, you can spend as much money as you want to make the sleekest website imaginable, but how will you know if it actually works or not? And if it’s not working… how would you know how to improve it?

You could certainly spend time taking your best guess and spending money on changes that might pan out… but that would be like asking a mechanic to diagnose what’s wrong with your car without looking under the hood. Chances are, you’ll end up with a laundry list of bills for new parts you didn’t need until you finally fix the problem— if your issue even gets resolved at all. 

That’s why we just can’t stress enough how important using website analytics is for your site. Embracing data and website analytics ensures that your decisions are grounded in concrete facts. This enables you to make a website that not only looks good but also delivers real measurable results.

So think of this article as your guide. We’ll help you understand the road ahead — what kind of metrics to look out for, how to tackle common challenges that come with interpreting them, and give you the know-how to avoid potential pitfalls that can trip you up on your way to website excellence. 

Of course, data analysis of website analytics is an entire field of its own and goes deeper than any one article could reasonably explain. But knowing even just the basics will put you leagues ahead of the competition! So by the end of your journey, you’ll be armed with the foundation and strategic mindset to be able to harness website engagement metrics.

The Basics of Website Analytics

Website engagement metrics show how users interact with your website. But what kind of metrics are these, exactly? There are quite a few metrics we use in website analytics, so it’s before diving into which metrics we use, let’s first consider what kinds of metrics there are. (Spoiler alert… it’s just 2!)

The first set of metrics are quantitative metrics. You can think of them as the backbone for your analysis. Quantitative metrics excel at providing raw numerical data that gives you objective, data-driven insights on how your site is performing. They’re the best way to get an unbiased measure of the effectiveness of your online presence. The numbers don’t lie, after all! Quantitative metrics include key performance indicators such as page views, unique visitors, bounce rates, average session duration, and conversion rates — among others. In short, they’re your classic web-use statistics.

Conversely, and no less importantly, are qualitative metrics. These are non-numerical assessments that include surveys, heat maps, and session recordings. The qualitative yin to the quantitative yang. (Bruce Lee anyone?) 

In less fancy terms, these metrics don’t rely on hard numbers, but they’re crucial in figuring out the “why” behind certain behaviors users take on your website. 

It’s important to note that using purely quantitative or qualitative metrics can mislead you since they don’t paint the entire picture alone. The real magic happens when they work together as a dream team — with website analytics, you can’t truly understand the full picture and develop a coherent strategy if you don’t take a holistic approach.

Quantitative Metrics

In the realm of website analytics and engagement, quantitative metrics are crucial to the strategy for your online presence, offering precise numerical data that reveals how users interact with your content. To put it simply, quantitative metrics are the “numbers” side of the analysis. Any statistics involving your website that can be represented numerically belongs in this category.

Developing key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential for measuring success and aligning with business objectives. Focusing on relevant KPIs can simplify data analysis and drive decision-making in web analytics and experimentation.

Let’s take a look at a list of key metrics to pay attention to:

• Pageviews: This is the total number of times a page has been viewed on your website. It’s useful in helping you understand which pages are getting the most attention and which pages may need a little love. 
• Unique Visitors: The number of different individual users that view your site. Pageviews don’t account for the same users viewing your site multiple times, so this helps paint a better picture of the actual size of your website’s traffic.
• Average Session Duration: This is an average of how long users spend looking at your site in a single visit. This can help gauge how interested someone is in your site — typically, the longer the better. However, it’s important to also corroborate that with other data (like conversion rate) to make sure they aren’t just spending a long time on your site and aren’t finding what they need.
• Conversion Rate: This percentage represents how many users complete a specific action on your site — for example, filling out a form, buying a product, or signing up for a newsletter. As you’d expect, the higher your conversion rate, the more likely your site is to be sailing smoothly and working effectively. As such, this is one of the most important website analytics to take note of.
• Bounce Rate: In some ways, bounce rate is the converse of conversion (try saying that fast 5 times!). This is the percentage of users who leave your site immediately after viewing just one page. For most websites, this is the homepage. A high bounce rate is very bad and means something is critically failing on your first page. However, bounce rates for one type of site or industry may not be a bad rate for another site.
• Exit Rate: While similar to bounce rate, exit rate is the percentage of users who leave after viewing a particular page during their overall visit. This can be helpful in determining low-performing pages.
• Average Page Depth: This is the average of how deeply users are viewing your website. The higher your average page depth, the more it can indicate a great interest in your website… or users not being able to find what they’re looking for — once again, this is why comparing website analytics holistically is so important!
• Traffic Sources: This breaks down where people are visiting your site — this can be from organic search, direct traffic, social media, referral links, and so on.
• Abandonment Rate: Strictly for e-commerce sites, this will show you how many people begin adding products to their cart but do not complete the purchase and leave your site.

Qualitative Metrics

Qualitative metrics, unlike the numbers game, are all about getting into the “why” of user actions on your website. Think surveys, heatmaps, and session recordings. These tools provide insights into user sentiment, preferences, and interactions, giving you a deeper look into what makes your website users tick. It’s like peeling back the layers to understand what your users really want, helping you fine-tune your website to deliver a top-notch user experience—or making sure they’re getting to where you need them to go.

• Surveys & Polls: Conducting surveys and polls allows you to collect direct feedback from your users about their experience with your website.
• Heatmaps: Heatmaps show you where your users are clicking, moving, or areas they are spending the most time on—in the form of a color graph that shows the more active areas as “hotter” (reds and yellows) and the less active areas as “colder” (greens and blues). Overall, they can be a bit of a deep dive, so you can learn more about heat maps here.
• Sessions Recordings: Sessions recordings track your user’s mouse movements on your website users to generate a video that re-enacts their entire journey through your website. These are invaluable for observing how users navigate and interact with your site, and identifying pain points or other areas of improvement.
• User comments: If you have a site that has the ability for users to willingly leave comments or reviews, these can highlight specific concerns or general feedback from your users.

Benefits of Web Analytics

Leveraging web analytics offers a multitude of benefits that can significantly impact your business’s success. Here are some of the key advantages:

• Improved User Experience and Engagement: By analyzing user interactions, you can identify pain points and areas for improvement, creating a smoother and more enjoyable experience for your visitors.
• Increased Conversions and Sales: Understanding what drives users to take action on your site allows you to optimize your conversion funnel, leading to higher sales and revenue.
• Enhanced Website Performance and Speed: Web analytics can help you identify and fix performance issues, ensuring your site runs smoothly and efficiently. The need for webpage speed is very important!
• Optimized Marketing Campaigns and ROI: By tracking the performance of your marketing campaigns, you can make data-driven decisions to improve their effectiveness and achieve better results.
• Better Decision-Making and Strategic Planning: With a wealth of data at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions that align with your business goals and drive long-term success.
• Competitive Advantage: Staying ahead in the digital landscape requires a deep understanding of your market and competitors. Web analytics provides the insights needed to make strategic moves that give you an edge.

By tapping into the vibrant potential of web analytics, businesses can unlock a treasure trove of insights into their website’s performance, user dynamics, and customer engagement. This rich data is crucial for crafting data-driven strategies, supercharging marketing campaigns, and significantly enhancing overall business success.

What tools do I need?

Just like if you were planning on renovating a house, you won’t get very far without the right tools… and improving your site through website analytics is no different. Web analytics services utilize tools to track visitors and gather data on user behavior, such as device and geographic location. To fully harness both quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (experience) website analytics, you’ll need one tool for each. And while there are of course many options available across the vast world wide web, we personally recommend using Hotjar.

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool, with widespread use among over 28 million websites. It offers functionalities like tracking various metrics and user behaviors, ease of integration with other platforms, and comprehensive reporting capabilities.

Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a highly popular and comprehensive tool for website analytics, providing all necessary data tracking capabilities such as pageviews, unique visitors, bounce rates, and conversion rates. It features a robust, user-friendly interface and is free to use, making it our top choice.

To install, start by creating a Google Analytics account, then add it to your WordPress site using a plugin like MonsterInsights, ExactMetrics, or Site Kit by Google, or manually for those preferring fewer plugins to keep site speed optimal. For manual installation, retrieve the tracking code from your Google Analytics account and insert it into your theme’s header.php file. Always back up your website and consider using a child theme before modifying core php files. If unsure, it’s safer to consult a professional web development agency to avoid damaging your site.

Hotjar:

Hotjar is a versatile tool that combines both qualitative (and quantitative) insights. The distinguishing feature is that it allows you to visually see, understand, and measure how visitors are behaving when they’re visiting your website. This is invaluable for determining why something is working, or not — and answering questions like:

• Where are users clicking? 
• How are they moving through my website?
• Are they seeing important information? What information is being ignored?
• When and where are users losing interest?
• Are there areas that cause frustration? Is the current user experience working well?

The way Hotjar enables you to access these metrics is by allowing you to leverage heatmaps, surveys, and session recordings. If you’re curious to learn more about using Hotjar, we recommend taking a look at our guide.

Much like with Google Analytics, you can either install Hotjar through a plugin or by adding the Tracking Code to your site manually. Once again, know-how permitting, we would recommend the manual route when possible.

Activating Hotjar with a plugin is as easy as you might expect — simply install, activate, and enter your Hojar Site ID (you can access that from your Hotjar account page). Make sure to verify your Tracking Code installation afterward, and you’re all set.

You can manually install the tracking code in a few ways. You can either install it through Google Tag Manager or by manually placing code into your website. To add it manually through code, you’ll want to go to your Hotjar account, copy the Tracking Code, and place it in the <head> tag of your website. Verify your installation — and you’re all set!

Setting Benchmarks and Goals

Now that you’ve set up your website to track website analytics, it’s time to talk about your future dreams and aspirations. And no… not like the first date kind.

Having website analytics on your website is great and all, but without a strategy for success, you won’t be getting the maximum value out of them. Without a point of reference, how do you know if what you’re doing is working or not?

That’s why setting up benchmarks and goals is pivotal for optimizing user engagement. By assessing your website’s performance through web analytics, you can collect and analyze data regarding user behavior and traffic patterns. This helps in establishing a benchmark to measure your actual growth and identify which areas need improvement.

Now you may be wondering, how do I set up benchmarks for website analytics? Let’s discuss.

Align the key performance indicators with your business

When setting up your benchmarks, it’s important to be grounded — especially at first. Sure, we’d all love to work towards a 0% bounce rate and a 100% conversion rate, but there’s no use in targeting fantasy goals. What makes up a good rate depends widely on your industry, audience, and website type. First, you’re going to need to do some digging and market research on what historically is average for what is as close to your niche as possible.

Don’t get lost in the vanity sauce

When setting benchmarks, don’t get caught up with focusing on making changes based on vanity metrics. These superficial numbers may look good on paper but don’t necessarily contribute to your business goals. Vanity metrics can be misleading out of context, and lead to misguided decisions when taken at face value without considering the rest of your metrics. For example, your Total pageviews can be really high, but alone, it says nothing about the quality of engagement or if users are actually taking desired actions and converting. 

So instead, make sure you’re prioritizing metrics that directly impact your website’s performance and user engagement and conversion. 

Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.

Remember, your website analytics are meant to continuously improve — this is not a one-and-done process, but an ongoing process that should last the entire lifespan of your business. As such, you’ll need to constantly be tweaking your benchmarks and goals as your website performance increases. 

Context ALWAYS matters

One common challenge we hear a lot of website owners face is becoming overwhelmed or fixating on specific metrics without understanding the broader implications of why they’re performing that way.

For example, take the influence of seasonality and external factors on engagement metrics. Seasonal variations (think holiday shopping spikes or summer lulls) can significantly impact metrics like traffic and conversion rates. Or even external factors like industry trends, economic changes, or unexpected events (anyone remember that whole global pandemic thing?) can also make your website analytics skew unpredictably. So understanding these contextual factors is so important for accurately reading your metrics.

So when in doubt, take a deep breath, slow down, and try to consider if there are contextual factors as to why your website analytics may not be performing as well as they should. And make absolutely sure to take note of when they do — because next time you may be able to capitalize on it better than ever before.

Achieve website excellence by analyzing website traffic

Ultimately, website analytics will act as your compass in the digital wilderness. It’s crucial in helping you make informed decisions so you can create a website that truly resonates with your audience. And by harnessing both quantitative and qualitative metrics, using the right tools, and setting meaningful benchmarks, you’ll be well-equipped to navigate making your website the best it can be.

But remember, behind every website, there’s a unique story to be told. That’s why, here at Mighty Fine, we’re not only focused on data but also on the people and stories that drive it. We’re not just passionate about website analytics; we’re committed to your success. If you’re ready to take your website to the next level, don’t hesitate to reach out. Let’s work together to unlock the full potential of your online presence. Contact us today and embark on a journey to website excellence!