Do you think it is important to understand how users behave on your website or any digital property?

Do you think it is important to know on what pages your users are coming into the website?

Do you also think it is important to know how long they’re spending time on your website and on what pages?

Of course, “Yes”

All this information helps us to understand who our users are and how we can create a user-pleasing experience. Many website owners do the mistake of making decisions based on assumptions about the user experience but, it is always advisable to make a data-driven decision. 

As, Data > Assumptions

So, let’s understand, what is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of internet data for understanding & optimizing web usage. It is the process of analysing the behaviour of visitors on a website.

It’s the system that collects data, analyses it, and provides meaningful numbers to get us out of our assumptions. Relying on assumptions is like relying on luck but, numbers always work as they give you real information. 

Web Analytics let you understand how to use the data collected from your website to get the insights about your business. There are many analytics tools that help you to get this data which can be divided into two categories:

·        Dimensions

·        Metrics

Let’s start with Metrics.

Metrics shows the quantitative measurements i.e., anything that you can count such as number of users, sessions and actions.

For example, you are selling an online course and you want to track how many people are buying your course or how much money you are making from your online course. Your analytics tool will provide you all such data by taking the real information from your website.

This data will be called as metrics.

By understanding the data, we try to analyze whether we are hitting our business goals or not.

This is known as Conversion. It is the action that you want your users to perform on your website or application.

Conversions are important as they are the key performance indicators in web analytics and can be divided into two types:

·        Micro Conversions = Smaller Goals

·        Macro Conversions = Ultimate Goals

As you will start using web analytics, you will understand that the Conversion Rate i.e., the amount of people that are visiting your website and then convert one of your business goals is dependent on the completion of Micro as well as Macro Conversions.

Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits in which your users take a desired action.

Conversion Rate = Leads/Visits * 100

Micro Conversions indicates that the user is moving towards the macro conversions. It helps you to understand the behaviour of your users.  For example, a user is creating account, signing up for your newsletter or grabbing the special offers comes under Micro Conversions.

Whereas, Macro Conversion happens when a user completes the final action i.e., the ultimate goal of your business.

Let’s take an ecommerce website example and divide their users broadly into three categories to understand the conversions.

–        One who is buying = Macro Conversion

–        One who is just scrolling or visiting their website = Micro Conversion

–        One who signed up/ subscribed = Micro Conversion but they are potential buyers

It’s important to measure and understand both micro and macro conversions to get quantitative as well as behavioral data. It will help you drive right outcome for your website.

Now go back to the first example.

In that case, if you come to know that your landing page is working well on desktop but not on mobile devices. As it is not working on certain devices, it is affecting your conversion rate. This data of users’ devices will be called as “Dimensions”

Dimensions are the attributes of visitors to your website.  It is the way to categorize the data showing the characteristics of your users, their sessions and actions. Dimensions include things like device type, screen sizes, browsers, geographic location and much more. It is any kind of data that can be use to describe the things that you are tracking.

By combining the metrics and dimensions, you can break down the data and track a lot of things that can help you to achieve your business goals.

Before deep diving into web analytics and its tools, it is essential to understand the terminology that can help you to understand the analytics reports. 

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