How Analytics Can Help You Improve Your Website Performance

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Website Performance
If you have a website that's underperforming and you aren't getting the traffic or conversions that you'd hoped for, and you aren't sure why, or what to do to remedy the problem, that's where “Analytics” comes in. In order to understand what's causing the poor performance, and to turn it around, you need to know if it's the lack of traffic, poor content, bad page design, geographical location of the visitor, or if it's something entirely different causing the negative behavior. But without using an analytical tool to answer those questions, it's hard to tell.

Website Performance

Analytical reporting will determine the behavior of your site by helping to find what works best and what doesn't. There is no better resource tool than analytics when it comes to tracking how visitors use your site, and how they navigate it once they're there. Tracking reports reveal things like where your visitors come from, what content they interact with most, and which content leads to the most conversions. They also tell you which social networks push the most traffic to your site and what content is most favored across your social networks. And if you would like to know which pages are performing best using a random sample of visitors, then analytical tracking reports are a must.

Having the necessary data to determine what is or isn't happening with your site will grant the advantage you need to turn things around.

Here are 5 ways analytics can help you improve your website performance:

  • It will show you what visitors don't like about your site.

    That's right. Because if you are experiencing a high bounce rate, then obviously something is wrong … at least according to your visitors because they are leaving just as fast as they come in. So analytics will help you pinpoint exactly what's making them leave and ultimately help increase conversion rates.

  • It will help measure your keyword ranking on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.

    How sure are you about the keywords you're using to drive traffic to your site? Are they actually performing as intended? Meaning, is your site showing up on the first page? The second? Third? Depending on which keywords you optimized for, is your site getting equal attention across the search engines? If not, analytics will let you know so you can adjust your keywords accordingly.

  • It will show you how you compare to the competition.

    If your visitors aren't staying as long on your site as they are on your competitor's, then clearly you need to make some adjustments. Perhaps it's to your layout or your content, or maybe even to your CTA. But without analytical reporting, it's difficult to know this level of detail. Without it, how do you compete in an industry saturated with online businesses that use these metrics on a daily basis to compete against you?

  • It will help identify load time for your site.

    Realistically speaking, load times for many of the sites on the web is around 4-5 seconds. According to Google, part of a good user experience involves your website loading within 2 seconds. So, if your site is loading slower than the average load time, then there's a chance visitors will click away and go to the competition. Which in turn, could mean potential profit loss for your business. Although, a good analytics report will identify these issues for you so that you can appropriately optimize your site to load faster.

  • It will disclose information necessary to help you set goals.

    If you haven't set any goals for your site, how do you know how well it's performing? In other words, how do you track your sales goals, site totals, and visitor traffic to individual pages on your site if you have nothing to measure them against? Tracking this kind of data helps you understand where you need to make improvements. Thus, it is imperative to set goals so you can achieve the outcome you desire.

If you are not using some form of analytics to engage the competition, you are doing yourself and your business a huge disservice.

Please contact us and let our group of website experts assist you with your digital marketing challenge, and help take your business to the next level.