Know Your Analytics

Google Analytics is the primary tool that most website marketing teams and SEO experts rely on to gauge an idea of a website’s performance, but you as a website owner or member of the company too can find the data harvested in Google Analytics imperative. The data compiled by Analytics can help you to analyse website traffic and sources, make recommendations and adjustments to marketing where necessary, and pinpoint any issues or plan goals and objectives accordingly.

Goole Analytics provides a vast wealth of data for website owners; where your visitors have come from to how long they stayed on the website and how many pages they have accessed, to whether they found you through ads or campaigns, search engines, direct or referral links. Generally analytical data is divided into three main areas: descriptive, prescriptive and predictive.

Descriptive

Descriptive analytics allow you to follow the insights of a website, understanding what is happening and how it is affecting sales targets and other objectives. Descriptive analytics would include analysing the impact of ad campaigns, SEO and keyword campaigns, traffic increases or decreases and regular progress reports. Using descriptive analytics, you can engage the website performance over various time-frames. Is the website performing better than last year, last quarter, or last month?

Prescriptive

Prescriptive analytics means looking at the historical data of your website (and Google Analytics allows you to check and compare different years) to make suggestions and set goals based on predictions based upon the users’ actions. For example, planning a social media campaign based on the prediction that users will share content and help to circulate it through new networks.

Predictive

Once again, analysing historical data and making comparisons is often more important than simply looking at how your website has performed today. This process involves making predictions based upon month-over-month performance and analytics. If one month you saw an increase of traffic of 5%, next month you may predict (based on previous data analysis) a further increase of 5%. Predictive analysis allows you to predict your users’ actions and adjust campaigns and content accordingly. Perhaps if you are going to bring out a new product line, begin marketing it early and you can likely predict that user interest will increase, and visits will occur more frequently as they eagerly await the new products.

Knowing your Analytics is more than simply monitoring a website’s progress, it is more about learning your website's strengths and weaknesses and adjusting its content, design and marketing accordingly to increase potential for return on investment, whilst ensuring steady increases across the board.

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