How can you truly know if your online presence is having a positive and meaningful impact on your readers, your customers, or your business partners? The answer is clear: web analytics. The insights you'll gain from using your web analytics tools can help you understand and measure how your audience interacts with your content, tools, videos, etc.
Most people have heard of page views, and you certainly read your users’ comments, right? There is much more that can be measured, however, including the time spent on a page, searches from a page, where users clicked next, etc. Where you work and what website platform you use will usually determine what kind of analytics tool you use. This can also make a difference in the data you are able to collect and monitor.
Our team of experts has used Google Analytics for many years. We’re not really trying to give Google a free ad, but it kind of is anyway. The deep insights we have gleaned from using their tool have been a game changer for us. They have also helped us make iterative tweaks to our site that have dramatically improved the overall user experience. The proof is in our before and after analytics reports.
Some of the metrics you can use to quantify your online success include, but are not limited to, Exit Pages, Next Page Path, Page Views, Searches from Page, and Time Spent on Page.
Let’s use Searches from Page as an example. Recurring searches from a webpage can be a good indicator that your audience is struggling to find important information.
Example: Over the course of a month, you had 547 searches for “best time to water my flowers” on your Gardening Tips 101 page.
Pro tip: Consider editing the content in question and make a recommendation for users who want to know the best time to water their flowers. If you already have the content available on your page, consider repositioning it.
If you want to provide more detailed information, such as watering tips based on flower/plant type, consider creating a new page to host that information. Then, add a link to the new page from the page that resulted in the high number of search queries.
In our upcoming posts, we’ll provide a detailed explanation and how-to training on the metrics mentioned above.
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