How Web Analytics Can Help You Make More Money Online
What is web analytics?
In simple terms, it’s the process of analyzing all of the data from your website. This includes your traffic stats, bounce rates, conversions, sales, and everything else you can record.
It’s a crucial part of running a website, particularly if you want to make money. Some people will ignore web analytics or won’t even know how to use them. Realistically, this is something you should be doing all the time. The constant analysis will help you improve your website and make a lot of money.
How? Well, let’s take a look:
Make Smarter Investments
One of the most basic things you can do with web analytics is to learn your best traffic sources. This is where your customers are coming from when they visit your site. Tools will help you see how people find your website, letting you understand what your best sources of traffic are.
Why is this significant and how can it help you make more money online?
Well, you will learn which sources demand more of your investment – and which ones don’t. For example, you’ve noticed that most of your paying customers find you through search engines. At the same time, your online advertising campaign isn’t yielding good results. Here, you can take money out of your advertising campaign and use it to further improve your search engine performance. As a result, you can gain more traffic from this source, helping you make money.
It’s a simple case of learning where to spend your money to make it more worthwhile!
Improve Your Landing Pages
A landing page is a page on your website that someone lands on as soon as they click a link. Specifically, this is the page they land on after clicking an advert for your website. Web analytics will help you understand how effective these landing pages are. As a consequence, you’re able to make changes to make them more effective in the future.
Let’s say your analysis shows you that certain landing pages aren’t yielding the desired results. You’re seeing a massive bounce rate on these pages, proving that they clearly aren’t up to scratch. Now, you can take these pages and make some careful changes to them. Try to make one or two changes at a time, then run tests to see if the stats improve. This makes it easier for you to identify what’s improving or weakening the performance of these pages.
Similarly, you can use web analytics to look at successful landing pages to see how they compare. You might have one landing page that converts like crazy. So, you can copy the format and layout of it for your other pages, and see if this improves things.
Ultimately, web analytics lets you make money by improving landing pages and making them more attractive to users. When someone clicks on an advert, they are already interested in what you have to offer. They’re very close to becoming a customer, but a lot lies in the success of the landing page. If it’s good, you can make more sales and boost your revenue. If it’s bad, the opposite will happen. Our analytics simply lets you pinpoint your bad landing pages and make them better.
Reduce Your Bounce Rates
We briefly introduced the idea of bounce rates in the above point. Essentially, a bounce rate refers to how many visitors are leaving your site before doing anything on it. They land on a page, then disappear without clicking any links or viewing other pages.
For a website owner, the bounce rate is very serious. It indicates a site that’s not attracting people’s attention and struggles to keep them interested. If anything, your bounce rate is possibly more important than your web traffic figures. Sure, you’re driving loads of traffic to your site, but is it actually doing anything for you and your business? Your site visitors are going up, yet your sales and conversions are still terrible.
Web analytics helps you understand why this is the case. You can use tools to see pages with high bounce rates, then make changes to them. Again, like your landing pages, you can identify any other pages that might have low bounce rates. This shows they are clearly doing a good job of keeping people on your site for longer, encouraging users to look around.
Make changes to your site, run web analytics to test the results, and see what happens. Slowly but surely, you will craft a website that has a low bounce rate across all pages. This helps you make more money online because visitors are sticking around for longer. In turn, you have more opportunities to convert them into paying customers.
Get to Know Your Target Audience
You may have an idea of your target audience when setting up your site. However, you won’t truly know until you use web analytics. The key is to look at the demographic data, which tells you more about your visitors. It should tell you things like:
- Age
- Gender
- Interests
From here, you slowly understand the people that are on your site. Not only that, but you can see the demographics that tend to be the highest converters. You have a clear picture of who your target customers are.
What can you do with this information? Use it to create better marketing and advertising campaigns that are targeted at this audience. You know what is most likely to interest them – and you can also figure out the best ways to target them.
Once more, you’re in a position where you can make smarter investments, throwing less money down the drain and seeing more money in return. If you can really zone in on your target audience, you can drive more of them to your site and boost your conversions dramatically.
How Do You Use Web Analytics?
To conclude, it helps to understand how you can actually use web analytics to your advantage. The good news is that most of the analysis and data are done for you by applications and software. Mostly, Google Analytics is used by website owners as it helps you analyze traffic really easily.
However, you could also use things like BigQuery if you want to include web analytics in your big data analysis. The reason people use this software is that it has useful features – like Dropbox BigQuery integration – and can handle thousands of terabytes of data all at once. If your site is relatively small, and you only care about web analytics, then big data probably isn’t something you need to care about.
Once you have found the tool you wish to use, you need to follow these steps:
- Set goals
- Collect the necessary data
- Identify your key performance indicators
- Develop a strategy based on the data you’ve analyzed
- Experiment and test
Just like that, you’re able to use web analytics to help you gain more money! The final part of the process is possibly the most integral. Testing is a key part of web analytics, and we’ve mentioned it a few times already. You need to make little changes to your site based on the data you’ve analyzed. Then, you can analyze it again to test if it’s made a positive change or not. Eventually, you reach a point where a positive change has been made, and your website is better.
All in all, web analytics helps you make more money online by improving the way your website operates. You can generate more targeted traffic that converts easily, leading to better profits.
