Commonly, the term website analytics refers to the measurement, analysis and reporting of traffic coming in or going out of your website. Web analytics professionals have to keep track of who visits their website, where they have come from, what they did exactly, once they entered your domain and where they went afterwards, when they moved on from your website. This information is of utmost importance when creating marketing strategy, search engine optimization campaigns and even website designs. (Information credit: GILL Solutions)

There are many website analytics companies and tools available in the market that provide detailed insight into how your website is doing and what your customers have to say about your product. This helps you to examine the sectors which need improvement. Overlooking these factors could be disastrous for the organization in the long run. Here are some points as to how important website analytics can be for the success of a business organization and why you should not ignore them.

·         Keyword insight: - It is very important that an owner of a website knows the words and phrases driving people to it in the first place. Web analytics gives you proof in quantified form. They can provide helpful information about which keywords are the big drivers of the traffic to the site. Not only that, they also provide information pertaining to how many people searched using that keyword or how many visitors are new or returning.

·         Customer Insight: - Careful examination of web analytics can shed light on the tastes of customers. Customer behavior can be studied, as web analytics provide information on what your customers are looking for, so that you can modify your existing market strategy to fit these needs.

·         Social Insight: - Web analytics help the website owner to identify traffic coming in or going out, the origin of that traffic and what it was doing while on the website. Using this, you can understand which social channels are more advantageous than others.

·         Page Quality: - Perhaps the most surprising aspect of using web analytics is that it can find holes in your website. If there are broken links, you will be alerted. It also provides data pertaining to each page of your website and whether or not it’s sending conversion leads.

·         Trends and Conclusions: - Analytics can provide day to day details about website traffic. This helps the user to see and examine the market trend overall, by examining past and present visitors.

So if a website is without web analytics, there is no way of finding out how potential customers are finding your site and how they are behaving once they arrive. Without this, it’s impossible for a company to understand which pages are performing well and which ones are not. Because of this, companies can waste a large amount of time and finances by investing in channels which are less lucrative and effective.

So to summarize the facts, web analytics sheds light on the following three aspects of your website:

v  Monitor website visitors and users who have stayed on your site. Along with that, find out about their click stream activity and keywords used. You can also check which visitors are new, and which ones are returning.

v  Optimize your site to the fullest. This helps you to write better targeted ads, and to strengthen your marketing initiatives which will result in a higher conversion rate.

v  Help you to formulate a sales and digital marketing plan. You can learn about the popular sections of your website and what your customers are looking for. You can also track highly viewed items and shape your product design accordingly. It can be used for enhancing other programs as well, like PPC. With all of this taken care of, you can focus on expanding your client base, as well as retaining your older customers.

Web analytics have proven to be an effective tool to track and monitor the efficiency of online campaigns. It can help you get statistics on the volume of traffic, which in turn improves the advertising campaign. Not only that, you can better understand your company website to gain an understanding of your brand followers. Small scale businesses which do not allocate a lot of money to their advertising campaigns can benefit from the use of web analytics.