Online marketing is now an essential part of any communication strategy. There are countless tools and tactics to help your brand stand out on the web: SEO, Google Ads, Landing Pages, Email Marketing, and more. But there’s one area that truly gives us the keys to success online — **Web Analytics**.
Web analytics is a set of tools and actions that provide valuable insights to help us make informed decisions about our website. Through it, we can discover interesting data such as:
- The number of visits and users on our site, as well as their demographic profile (age, gender, location).
- The most commonly used devices to access your website — a crucial point to ensure your site is responsive and properly adapted to all screens.
- Where your users come from, and which channels perform best — Google, other websites, social media, or direct traffic by typing your brand name.
- How to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing actions and determine which strategies are the most profitable.
- Your competition’s performance in terms of search engine positioning.
- Website usability and content quality analysis.
- And much more…
What do I need to keep control over my website?
To properly analyze everything related to your website, it’s essential to establish and understand a few key tools and basic steps:
- Before launching any campaign, it’s crucial to define your objectives — so you can later measure your results against them.
- Set a time period to compare data from equal durations. This helps you study your website’s traffic seasonality. For example, a travel website will likely see more visits during the summer months or around Christmas.
- Choose a reliable tool to gather your data. A great, completely free option is Google Analytics.
- Review the data and create reports so you can compare performance over time.
- Interpret the data and use that information to implement improvements or new online marketing strategies.
