​Improve your website with analytics

By Frida Rydén

Why should companies work with web analytics? Because with analysis, you can gain invaluable knowledge on how your audience finds you and establish when and where extra effort is needed.

Web analytics is a way to understand and study the behaviour of your visitors and ultimately a way to deliver better results. It can help you find answers to questions such as:

• What contributes to actual conversions? In other words, is the creative content you are producing, really connecting with your target audience?

• How can we best allocate our budget? What needs extra attention? The UX of our website or strategic work with SEO to increase traffic?

What you want to establish is a complete picture of your visitors. You also want to know if your website is working as intended and if your content captures your target audiences' attention, making them connect with your brand.

The building blocks you need to set up are a strategy and accurate data. Then, identify the metrics that matter most in measuring your organisation’s success. The KPIs you choose to work with should corresponding to goals that have an actual impact on your organisation.

Find out what type of content that interests your audience

It might be worth investing in some additional tracking to find the answers you want. For this to appear in the Behaviour Report in Google Analytics, ask a web analyst for advice on how to set up tracking, preferably in Google Tag Manager:

• See the articles with the highest number of visits and understand if they have read the article in full (scrolled 100%)
• What blog posts are being shared on social media
• Focus on pages, where the visits have directly led to a user completing an action, for example signing up for newsletters, clicking "Contact Us" or any other CTAs

Find out where your audience is coming from

What channels are attracting visitors to your website? Which of them provide traffic that leads to conversions and engagement? Within the acquisition report in Google Analytics, you can instantly gain insight on where your visitors are coming from. You can use this to drill down into the channel of your interest to see if the channels you are investing in are also delivering results.

This requires goals to be set up in Google Analytics - something an analyst can help out with.

Additional Tools

Link your tools to get an overview and make it more easy to draw conclusions. Tools you should link to your Google Analytics account are Google Ads and Google Search Console.

Get your website visitors to help you by using chat bots or tools where you easily set up short web surveys. Also, heat maps of user’s behaviour, such as Hotjar, will give clues on how users are interacting with your website.

An effortless user journey

Essentially, it all comes down to the main reason you have a website in the first place: establishing a successful way to support the chain of events that ultimately lead your visitors to convert, thus creating revenue or value for your company.

Let's look at this from a user's point of view. When a customer visits a website, their interaction with the site should be as effortless as possible. It should be easy to locate relevant information and points of contact where necessary. While you're at it why not convey your message and establish brand awareness? Show the visitors what you do and who you are as a company.

In order to do this, you need to learn more about your visitors and find ways to improve their user journey. In other words: make your digital presence the best it can be!