The right way to use web analytics

Analytics tools can give you general answers to the following questions about traffic to your website:

How many people are using the site?
How do they get there?
Which content are they using?
When are they visiting?
What browsers are they using?

But since the numbers you get from your analytics package are not necessarily accurate, the most value comes from comparisons of the data within one analytics system. To get the most out of analytics, you can compare metrics over time, compare metrics directly, compare segments, and look for patterns and trends in the data. For the following examples, we’ll use Google Analytics to do some comparisons of the data.

Option 1: Compare metrics over time

This comparison is the easiest to do—just select any metric and compare two periods of time. It’s a great way to see if there’s an increase or decrease in traffic, whether the percentage of traffic you’re getting from mobile is increasing significantly, whether top keywords that send traffic to your site are changing, and which content is most popular over time.

Select a timeframe (the past 6 months vs. the previous 6 months, before and after a redesign, before and after a new ad campaign, etc.) and compare:

Audience: Number of Visits, Visit Duration, New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors, Operating System, Mobile Usage
Traffic Sources: Sources, Top Keywords, Social Sources
Content: Top Pages, Landing Pages

The graph below shows that visits to the site have increased over two time periods.

What to do with this information:

Look for trends and see if numbers are going up or down. See if there are seasonal visitor trends.
Adjust your website to anticipate future performance using these trends, or if trends are negative, create content or redesign to reverse the trend. For example, if mobile usage is increasing, work on optimizing your site for mobile. If certain keywords are trending up, create valuable content using those terms. If a landing page is getting more hits, create content and links on that page to keep visitors on the site longer or make conversions easier.

Option 2: Compare metrics directly

Other easy comparisons are looking at metrics that show percentages, site engagement, or finding your top content and landing pages. Targeting web and content development to the largest audience for your site, concentrating on strong keywords, or developing the types of content that seem to be most valuable can help your site’s long-term performance.

Some metrics to compare directly:

Audience: Demographics, Technology, Mobile
Traffic Sources: Sources, Referrals, Search/Keywords, Landing Pages
Content: Content Drilldown

The chart to the right shows which pages get more views. In this example, the home page is the most visited by far.

What to do with this information:

Look for where the most activity is.
Concentrate your web and content development in the most active areas, or in areas where you’d like to see growth. Make your most visited pages or most downloaded content more prominent by featuring them on popular landing pages and the home page. Use the keywords your customers are searching for in your content. If an important keyword has a high bounce rate, create content to target visitors using that keyword.

Option 3: Compare Segments

To make a deeper comparison, you can use Advanced Segments. On any GA page, just click on the Advanced Segments button at the top and you can select which segment(s) to include. Sample segments are all visits, new visitors, mobile traffic, non-paid search traffic, and more. You can compare one to the other, or compare one over time.

Some interesting segments to compare, either with each other or over time, are:

Audience: All visits vs. Mobile Traffic – Audience Overview
Traffic Sources: Non-Paid Traffic vs. Paid Traffic – Traffic Sources
Content: Mobile Traffic – Content Drilldown, Search Traffic vs. Direct Traffic – Landing Pages

The chart below shows how many visits to a single page came from mobile devices compared to all visits to the page.

What to do with this information:

Take a deeper look at some of the trends or comparisons you made earlier. For example, if your mobile audience is growing, which are the top pages mobile users access?
Use this information to optimize key pages for mobile, or consider creating a mobile app for the information or functionality on those pages. If you get more visits for keywords from non-paid traffic, you may be able to decrease your paid advertising.

Use the data to improve your website

While you can’t get exact numbers from any one analytics program, the data from one program, such as Google Analytics, can be used to do valuable comparisons that can help you gain insights about your visitors, spot patterns and trends, and figure out what is working on your site and what isn’t. There are always global trends to pay attention to; the micro-trends related to your specific audience are sometimes more important. Use Google Analytics to collect the data and then run comparisons of that data to give you an idea of where you should concentrate your web and content development efforts.