One of the keys to success with online marketing is understanding analytics. If you know how to make sense of the data, analytics will reveal major insights about your marketing over time.
Making sense of the numbers is a big part of my job at Emphasize Design. I am the one who makes sure you are getting the most out of your marketing buck. To capitalize on your website analytics for online business in Calgary, there are a few fundamental terms and tactics I turn to.
The Language of Analytics: Key Terms for Understanding Your Website Data
Learning the lingo is an important first step to understanding analytics, and will make your life much easier when it’s time to decipher your analytics:
- User – The people who visit and use your website. In analytics, a user is anyone who has completed a session (which we’ll cover next), within a selected date range.
- Session – Essentially, a record of everything that a user does during a visit to your website. One user can have multiple sessions in a given date range, and generally the time length maxes out at 30 minutes.
- New Session – One of the most important pieces of data you can retrieve. A new session is completed by a user who is visiting your website for the first time, and it can tell you a lot about your usability.
- Pageviews – Encompasses all pages viewed during a session, including repeat views of the same page.
- Pageviews/Session – The average number of pages viewed in a session, which helps you understand how long people are sticking around (again, usability).
- Bounce Rate – A measurement of the number of sessions that result in a single page view. You don’t want a high bounce rate.
- Goal – The task(s) that you want a user to complete when they visit your website. Common goals include making contact, signing up for an email list or special offer, consuming content, or making a purchase.
- Conversion – The wonderful word that describes when a user completes a goal (defined by you and your online marketing plan). Conversions are always a priority.
- Campaign – Tactic that allows you to research where your traffic is coming from, and understand how users are finding your site.
- Acquisition – Strategies for acquiring new users. There are a ton of ways to approach acquisition, depending on the target audience, goals, and personality of your business.
- Behaviour – How users engage with and progress through your website. Behaviour data is critical to optimizing the user experience of your website.
Putting Analytics to Work for Your Business
You’ll be able to go into great detail with your analytics as you build your knowledge base, but today we’re going to keep the focus on important, fundamental analyticstesting you can do for understanding your website.
- A/B Testing – The basic idea of A/B testing is very straightforward. You test two versions of the same page or website feature, with a group of people who represent your target demographics. This is one of the simplest ways to test your site, and can be used to test almost anything about your web presence.
- SEO Testing – Can you find your website on search engines? Search engine optimization is a huge part of online marketing, and it’s important to make sure that people can find your website by searching the terms most relevant to your industry/location. As you get more familiar with analytics, keyword research will allow you to further hone your SEO.
- Call-to-Action Testing – A call-to-action (CTA) encourages users to take the next step, often by asking for a quote, continuing to more content, making a purchase, or making contact with a member of your team. Effective CTAs are critical for driving engagement, and it’s easy to test two (or more) CTAs against one another.
Emphasize Website Design in Calgary
No matter how you choose to get started, remember that it takes some time to realize the full potential of website analytics for your online business campaigns in Calgary. As long as you keep learning and place a high value on data, you’ll start collecting useful insights almost from the start. The trick is building on what you learn, and repeating the process over time with an eye on constant improvement.
Emphasize Design of Calgary has the tips you need for successful online marketing, and the web design skills to make your business stand out online. Get started with a free website design quote from our team!
