Introducing Web Analytics in Zoho PageSense

Let's say you've had your website up and running for a while, and you've executed several marketing strategies, including paid advertising, content creation, and social media promotions to attract visitors and grow your business. While some of these tactics could have generated higher traffic for your website, others could have failed to generate any result. Now, how will you determine which of your efforts is paying off and what improvements to make in your future marketing plan?

With the right tool in hand, you can effortlessly track which marketing plan is working best for your business or what isn't and then use this information to adjust your overall strategy. To help you with this, we introduce the web analytics in PageSense — a data-rich addition to our CRO software that gives you a unified picture of all the key performance indicators (KPIs) needed to measure your website’s effectiveness and your marketing activities.

So, what exactly is web analytics and how does it differ from other experiments in PageSense?

By definition, web analytics is the method of tracking, analyzing, and reporting the most valuable metrics about your website based on your visitor's activity and behavior on your pages. While there are several website metrics you can already track using PageSense, the new web analytics report will help you focus on the following three areas:

The KPIs on your website that measure the success or failure of your marketing campaigns
Identifying the strength and weaknesses of your website traffic
Strategies to improve your user experience and conversions on your site.

This method of tracking and collecting your visitor's data is a little different when compared to other experiments in PageSense because:

Web analytics starts automatically collecting data about your visitors and your web pages as soon as you install the PageSense code snippet in it.
Unlike other experiments that track metrics based on visitor data, web analytics tracks, collects, and reports your entire web metrics based on sessions. These sessions are identified through a unique cookie placed in your visitor's browser.
Also, web analytics tracks quantitative data on your website that helps identify where your traffic comes from and what it does on your site. However, the other features in the tool provide you qualitative data that describes which elements they click or interact with on your pages and why they behave the way they do.

Now that we know what web analytics is, let's see what KPI metrics the analytics report tracks and how this data can be useful to grow your online business.

Top web analytics metrics you can track in PageSense

Your new web analytics dashboard brings in a slew of new metrics to monitor your website's performance. Below are the top metrics you will want to begin with:

Total visitors and new visitors: This metric shows you the total number of visitors (both new and returning) your site receives during a given period. It's helpful at gauging how well your marketing efforts are working in driving new visitors and also gives an overall snapshot of your site's improvement.
Session: This metric provides the total number of visitor interactions (both new and returning visitors) that take place on your website within a given time frame. It's helpful in learning if you're good at directing people back to your site through different marketing campaigns.
Page views: This metric shows the total number of times a specific page was viewed by visitors in a given time frame. A high number of pageviews can indicate how popular a post or page is on your site.
Pages per session: This metric shows the average number of pages viewed during a single session on your site. A high pages/session rate can indicate that your visitors are highly engaged and willing to explore more of your site.
Average session duration: This metric provides the average amount of time your visitors spend on your website. It's helpful for indicating how visitors are truly engaging with your site’s content.
Average time on page: This metric measures the average length of time your visitors spend interacting with a specific page.
Bounce rate: This metric indicates the percentage of sessions in which visitors view only one page and then leave your site without triggering an event or clicking to another page on your site. A high bounce rate signals there is something wrong or needs immediate attention on your site that makes visitors exit right away without further interaction.
Goal completion rate: This metric measures the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your site, such as making a purchase or signing up for an email newsletter. It reflects how much your business is moving ahead or towards your set target or objective.

How to use web analytics metrics for your business

Using web analytics in PageSense, you get access to a growing amount of website data that can help align your overall marketing and business goals. The key to avoid drowning in this sea of numbers is to start analyzing information that matches with your real business needs. Here are a few ways your web analytics metrics can be useful for your business and help keep your wheels spinning:

Identify the best performing traffic channels (or sources)
As a marketer, the main aim of running different marketing campaigns on your site is to get heaps of traffic. So, once you drive a significant amount of traffic, the next logical question to ask is which marketing channel (guest blogging? social media? paid ads) is driving the most visitors and leads to your business. Web analytics makes tracking each of your channel metrics easy. Click on the Channels report and you can see the top traffic channels (organic search, referrals, direct visits, or social media) that send visitors to your site with the highest number of sessions and goal completion rate. Using this data, you can determine which channel is more profitable for your business, the areas to decrease (or increase) your marketing/ad spend, and later start rolling out fresh plans for your low traffic generation channels.
Know the most popular pages on your website
Once you launch your website, you can start adding as many pages as you want and as many blog posts as you want, but how will you be sure that your pages are getting enough traction and engagement from visitors? Also, are visitors paying more attention to the most important pages (home, features, or contact us page) than others? You can find these answers in your web analytics report. Using the All Pages report, you can see which specific blog posts and web pages are performing best on your site with the highest number of page views and average time on page metrics while also learning what type of content visitors are most interested in. Once you identify this data, you can begin analyzing the best titles, keywords, and descriptions that you've used on these pages and find ways to repurpose your top content topics into formats like ebooks, infographics, videos, etc.
Determine where your best-converting customers are located
No matter how big or small your business is, learning which country or city your customers originate from and how their needs differ by geography is crucial to understanding where exactly to advertise your products. This is another piece of essential information web analytics can provide. Using the Country report in analytics, you can effortlessly track which major countries, states, or cities are sending the best-converting traffic to your website and further measure how well your marketing ads are performing in these geographical areas. Besides this, you can see how many sessions you have recorded in each of your sales regions and the engagement rates (like average session duration and bounce rate) found in specific regions. This information will let you identify promising new locations to target with your upcoming ad campaigns and hence expand your business market in high-potential areas.
Identify and fix the leaky pages on your website
Sometimes you might see a lot of people entering your buyer's journey, but only a few are becoming paid customers. Have you wondered why this happens and which pages turn them away from your site? Your web analytics report can tell you that. By looking at the Exit Pages report, you can learn which particular pages your visitors most often leave from your website and then investigate what underlying problems these pages have that make them exit before converting. Generally, this could be due to poor organization of content on your page, excessive (unwanted) content, or technical issues related to the page. So, once you learn the reasons behind these leaky pages, you can put appropriate marketing efforts and content optimization techniques in place to encourage visitors to stay longer on your site and successfully convert into your sales funnel.

Measure the success of your business goals
Your website might get hundreds and thousands of visitors every day, but if those visitors don't complete the key goal that is defined for your business, your efforts have gone to waste, right? So, how do you actively monitor those goals that allow you to refine your marketing approach and improve your overall conversions? Web analytics can help you with this. Goals are just the specific actions that visitors perform on your website to fulfill your target objective like signing up for your product, downloading an ebrochure, or subscribing to your newsletter. This completed activity is measured as the goal completion rate in your web analytics report. A high goal completion rate can indicate that your business' objective is successful while a low completion rate could mean you're attracting the wrong audience or your website isn’t powerful enough to convince audiences to perform the desired action.

Segment and understand your target audience better
Finally, let's say you know which top marketing channels, web pages, and goals on your website are driving the highest visitors and conversion rates to your business. But, what if you have more specific questions like which day of the week your social media campaigns perform the best? Or how do returning visitors engage with your homepage? The web analytics report has the answers to those as well. Using the Segment Audience filter in your report, you can easily isolate and analyze data of a specific subset of audiences that matter the most for your business rather than looking at the whole of the website visitor data. This segmentation can be done based on either a predefined set of audience conditions like visitor type (new and returning), device used by visitors (mobile and desktop), day of the week, different traffic sources, or through custom audience parameters like age, gender, language, and many more.

How to set up web analytics for your website

Setting up web analytics for your business is simple and quick. Just install our two-line Javascript code in the <head> tag of your website, and PageSense will immediately start tracking your visitor's actions and behavior on your site using cookies. To make visitors aware of the use of cookies, we recommend you setting up a privacy consent banner on your website.

Once you get an overall picture of your general website metrics, you can start exploring the why and how part of the website analytics using the core CRO features available in PageSense including funnel analysis, heatmaps, session recordings, a/b testing, and more.

A final word on using the all new web analytics in PageSense

We believe that with the many benefits of PageSense as a CRO tool for your online business, the new web analytics report can tremendously help take your business to the next level. Because in the world of digital marketing, without tracking the right website metrics, your well-planned conversion strategies could only lead to a waste of time and money on methods that just aren’t working. The web analytics report lets you just bridge this gap between your daily marketing activities and your site analytics within a single platform—no extra tools or tracking code required.

So, what better reasons could you want to get started with the most valuable metrics about your business? Kickstart your tracking right away! If you have any questions or feedback, please share them in the comment box below or write to us at support@zohopagesense.com.