Website analytics 101: What it is and why it's worth your time
Orient yourself around the concept of website analytics, dispel intimidation, and set expectations for the rest of this series.
What are website analytics
Website analytics are a record of who visits your website and the things they do while on it. A variety of data points can be measured such as where the user is located, how they reached your website, the amount of time they spend on it, any buttons they clicked or purchases they made, and what page they left from.
Demographic data—information about who is visiting your website—can be used to refine your understanding of your audience. Behavioral data—information about what visitors are doing on your website—can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your user experience and identify potential pain points.
Why website analytics matter for small businesses
Website analytics are a valuable tool allowing you to connect website performance and specific visitor behavior directly to business outcomes. Leveraging analytics is a cost-effective way to gain a deeper understanding around engagement, usability, and effectiveness of content.
Leveraging analytics in the planning and decision making process can help create a foundation for making future changes, and create a benchmark by which to measure the effectiveness of said changes—allowing you to rely on data instead of guesswork in an effort to find improvements that "move-the-needle" in meaningful ways.
What website analytics can (and can't) tell you
Analytics can show you where visitors come from, what they click on, and where they leave your website from. Analytics cannot show you exactly why someone left your website, what their intent was, or their personal identity.
Data tells you what is happening at any given time, but it fails short of explicitly giving you the why behind any behavior or actions. Understanding different tactics for analyzing data, how to use multiple metrics in combination, and what factors commonly influence different metrics will help you make more strategic inferences or "hypotheses" about what these "why's" are.
Three questions website analytics can help answer
1. Who is visiting my website?
While analytics cannot tell you personal specifics it can reveal broader demographic data such as information about visitor locations, and device types, and possibly even age or gender. You can use this information to evaluate if the reality of the type of visitor your website is drawing matches the audience you are trying to target.
2. What are visitors actually doing on my website?
Behavior data such as page views, page exits, clicks, conversions, and other types of trackable engagement all help to paint a picture of what's happening when people come to your website. By strategically tracking and analyzing the completion rates for key actions you can see exactly how many visitors are completing the task or action you want them to.
3. Where visitors are getting stuck or leaving your website
Trends in data points like exit rate can be a red flag for potential problems in your UX. While the data can't tell you an exact reason why someone left your website it can point you to a section of your website that might be worth focusing improvement efforts on.
Common tools for website analytics
There are a lot of options available these days at a variety of price points and complexity. While Google Analytics is a free and commonly used tool, we don't love it (or recommend it) due to the complexity of correctly setting it up and issues with international data compliance.
Here at AccelerateUX we use and do recommend Fathom Analytics as a reliable (and GDPR compliant!) solution to collecting website analytics.
Get $10 off your first month when you sign up for Fathom Analytics.
Full disclosure: We only endorse and promote tools that we actively use and rely on, but may earn a small commission on signups via our website. These commissions help keep AccelerateUX up and running.
Additionally, many website builders offer some basic analytics built into the platform. While these tools are typically limited, and do not allow you to track any specific event engagement or other behavior data, they do offer insights into your visitor demographics, page views, and exit rates—and may be a low-effort place to get started reviewing website performance data.
How this series is organized
Like all of our resources this series has been broken up into the following learning tracts: Getting started and key concepts.
Getting started
A place to acquaint yourself with web analtyics as a concept. Use these articles to acquire broader, background information about this aspect of running a website.
Key concepts
In-depth breakdowns of key terminology and concepts related to website analytics. Designed to strengthen your knowledge and create a foundation to better understand the aspects of website analytics as a whole.
A realistic first step
Our content is designed to be read in or out of order. If you're overwhelmed with with the amount of information available and aren't sure where to start, we recommend picking 1-2 metrics you would be interested in learning more about—or want to begin tracking—and start there.