Why is Website Analytics Important for Marketing?
It’s essential for businesses to have an online presence in order to compete and succeed. Your website design and overall site experience are incredibly important to your customer, especially since your website will usually be a prospective customer’s first impression of your brand. However, simply having a website isn’t enough. You need to have website analytics in place to ensure that your website is performing at its best.
Website analytics is essentially the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of website data for the purpose of understanding and optimising web usage. It involves tracking user behaviour on your website, such as how long they stay on a page, which pages they visit, and where they’ve come to your website from (e.g. social media).
Preparing for the Shift to Google Analytics 4
The general consensus is that Google Analytics is the best website analytics platform available, and we agree! It’s the go-to for all our Halston Group brand websites and our clients’. In fact, approximately 28.1 million websites use it. And this summer, Google Analytics is having a mandatory upgrade to Google Analytics 4, the platform that’s set to supercharge web analytics as we know it.
Is your business one of the 8.2 million websites (and counting!) that’s already migrated to GA4? If so, you’ll already be benefitting from its analytics superpowers, which you can find out more about here: What is Google Analytics 4?
It’s essential that you migrate to Google Analytics 4 when before July 1st when Google Universal Analytics officially sunset. This will mean you can minimise the risk of losing any valuable website data! So, it’s important you jump on this ASAP.
But for now, let’s stick to the basics with three things everyone needs to know about why website analytics is important.
You can gain a deeper understanding of your audience!
You can get a deeper understanding of your audience! Investigating and understanding your audience is super important, website analytics data helps you paint a picture of your audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviours. Meaning you can create more targeted marketing campaigns and content that really speaks to and resonates with your audience!
Assess and enhance the user experience
Website analytics will help you identify any areas of difficulty or frustration your audience may be experiencing. This involves looking at measures like page engagement rate, which is the total percentage of user sessions that are engaged sessions. You can also view the full navigational flow of the user to understand how people are moving through your site and make improvements based on this data to improve the amount of time your audience spends online!
Measure marketing ROI
Website analytics can help you measure the ROI of your marketing campaigns to support your understanding of what works well, and what needs improving. By tracking the performance of specific campaigns, you can identify patterns in those driving the most traffic and conversions and use this to inform any future onsite marketing activities.
Is Google Analytics 4 improving the quality of website analytics?
Google’s previous Universal Analytics was released back in 2005, if you think about how quickly technology advances – this overhaul to Google Analytics 4 was definitely overdue! Google Analytics 4 is designed to enhance website analytics by providing more precise and comprehensive insights into user behaviour and interactions on the site. We really enjoy taking regular deep dives into GA4 on our own site and have already made some optimisations based on website data for our own user experience!
That was a whistle-stop tour of the fundamentals of why website analytics are so important to your business. So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to start implementing Google Analytics 4 on your website, before the inevitable summer deadline! For GA4 advice or support with migrating your website, get in touch with our team.