Why? It's simple. If you're spending money on building a website and driving traffic to it, the effectiveness of your website in converting this traffic into sales or leads is determinant for your business success. So you need to understand how this traffic is converting into customers and more importantly, if it doesn't convert, you need to understand why and then do something about it - web analytics do just that.
Used properly, it helps you:
Understand who went to your website
How many people went to your website, how many pages they've visited and how long they stayed, how many of them were new visitors (important to growth) and how many were returning visitors, are a few of the several information analytics gives you about your visitors, allowing you to determine if you're attracting enough qualified visitors.
Know how they got there
You need to discover how your different campaigns (Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation, online display, affiliate…) work together to deliver the most profitable users to your site. Measure how much traffic you get from your campaigns, and how well they convert visitors into customers. Once you know which channels and campaigns are the most effective, you can allocate your budget wisely and get a better return from the money you spend.
Know what they did on your site
As previously mentioned, more visitors often equal more business. However a common mistake is to try to get as many visitors as possible to the website, and then hope they will do the right thing. Unfortunately it's not that easy and it is important that you understand what elements of your website might be preventing your visitors from becoming customers.
If you know how they are using your website, where they go wrong and what difficulties they faced, you can they modify your website to push them to take the right actions. This is particularly important for the profitability of your paid campaigns. The bounce rate (percentage of people leaving your website immediately after landing on it) and the conversion rate are two important indicators to monitor.
Actionable data
The more you know, the better your decisions are. Web analytics delivers meaningful data that can dramatically improve your return on investment. It is however, just a tool; it's up to you to translate this knowledge into actions.
