1. How many visitors do I have on the website at a given time?
   
2. Where do they come from?
   
3. Which channels or pages on the site are the most popular?
   
4. How much time are visitors spending on the site?
   
5. Which traffic sources convert the most (or least) effectively?
   
6. Are my recent marketing campaigns driving enough traffic to the site?
   

That's when the web analytics in PageSense can come handy to you.

What exactly is web analytics in PageSense?

Web analytics is the method of tracking, analyzing, and reporting more valuable website metrics that helps you understand your visitor's actions and behavior on your site. This report shows you numbers and graphs that reveal the overall picture of the key performance metrics like the total number of visitors who visit your website, how they land (channels and traffic sources) on your site, how many sessions they had on your site, which pages they enter and exit your site, how long they spent on your site, and more. 
While there are hundreds of website metrics you can track, web analytics in PageSense can show you exactly where your best customers come from and which marketing (or SEO) efforts are attracting visitors to your content, and whether or not your investments are paying off for your online business. You can use these insights to fine tune your website content and marketing campaigns to better attain your company's goal and further maximize its return on investment (ROI).

Web analytics data in PageSense can help you focus on:

• The key performance indicators(KPIs)  on your website that measures 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.
  

Benefits of using web analytics in PageSense

• Study your website's total traffic
  The key element for a business’ success is your website traffic. A good amount of traffic to your website can indicate growth, while less traffic could mean you haven't targeted the right audience segment or your marketing strategies are not effective. With web analytics, it's easy to track and learn how many people actually come to your website over a defined period of time (e.g. last week, month or year), and whether you’re seeing an increase in website traffic through your recent marketing activities like paid ads, content blogs, or email campaigns. Most importantly, your report also tells you the number of new visitors who accessed your site to find out whether your marketing effort is bringing in new eyes to your website.

  

  For example, if you're running a Facebook ad in the month of October and want to see if it's effective in bringing traffic to your business then tracking the visitors count metrics for this month, can help you learn if your ad is compelling and useful, as well as how many of the returning visitors are interested in coming back again.
  

• Identify your traffic sources (or channels)
  As a marketer, you may have advertised or published your marketing materials and blog contents in dozens of different places. Understanding how appealing your content is to your visitors and which sources are bringing in the maximum traffic to your site is crucial for creating data-driven decisions for your online business. With web analytics in PageSense, you can see the exact traffic sources, such as organic, referral, direct, paid, or social media, that drive people to your website. You can also see which these channels or sources are getting the highest traffic to your website. This metrics can help improve your traffic generation plans starting from the best traffic generation channels, and also optimize your website for enhanced user experience and visitors.

  

  For example, if you recently shared a post about your products or services on various online platforms, and you see that a significant amount of your traffic arrives through social media sites, then you can consider investing more of your marketing time and budget in social media channels.
  
  
  

• Improve your content marketing and SEO strategy
  With everyone focusing on digital marketing today, search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing strategies have become the foundation to attract more people to your website pages and improve conversions. Using web analytics, you can easily understand which of your content marketing strategies work or don't work, by looking at the top pieces of blog posts and website pages that perform the best with a high volume of page visits, time spent on page, visitor counts, and goal conversions. Once you identify this data, you can start analyzing the best titles, keywords and intros that you've used on these pages. You can then discover what type of content your audiences are interested in, such as whether they look for short, easy-to-skim informational pieces; long, step-by-step tutorials, or pages with bright and vivid colors and images.

  For example, if you see blog posts that provide answers to the problems and questions of visitors gets the most views and online traffic on your blogging site, then you can create new content pieces that resonate best with these audience requirements. This helps them stay longer on your website, increasing organic traffic and search rankings. 

• Understand where your customers are located
  Whatever type of online business you are running, in order to provide the best user experience on your site, it's essential to track which geographic location your customers are coming from, and how the demands and needs of visitors differ from place-to-place. Using the country-specific reports in web analytics, you can effortlessly track and monitor your visitors' data based on which country, state, or even the city they are coming from. You can use this information to discover what the visitors from each particular location are looking for, then fine tune your materials to target specific audience groups. These metrics can show you how many countries you get visitors from, and help you figure out why some regions don't convert. You can use these details to plan for special offers, discounts or other incentives to boost sales for those regions.

For example, if you want to run business events or seminar meet-ups for your local partners or clients , you need to find out where your best audience is located. You can then start investing your marketing efforts and event promotions targeted to audiences from this specific locations. 

• Identify pages with high bounce rate and low conversion rate
  Visitors come to your site because they have a specific need, problem, or desire. However, if they don't find what they're looking for they may leave your site immediately without taking any further actions or viewing any other pages. This action or behavior of visitors can be clearly tracked with the bounce rate metrics in web analytics. The bounce rate on your website can act as an indicator of the success and effectiveness of your page. By keeping track of this data, you can understand which channels or pages are contributing to high bounce rates, then discover the intention of visitors coming to your page. Bounce rates can also help you to make informed decisions regarding content marketing, paid ads, SEO, and user experience on your site, which can lead to better conversions. 

For example, let's say the paid search traffic bounce rate is too high in your report. In this case, you can dig into your campaign source to be sure that the ad's keywords, the ad copy, and the landing page you linked the ad to is well-aligned with your message. If you have ads with a mismatched messaging (such as a 50 percent discount sale but no mention of it on the page), visitors will get spooked and leave the page without looking further.

• Track and measure your business goals
  

  Now, let’s say your website is attracting huge number of visitors, page views, and time spends, and every metric is much greater than what you expected. But if they are not meeting your business goals, then you're wasting your traffic and the marketing spends. Using web analytics, you can track the most important goals and conversions on your website in order to see how much your business is moving ahead or progressing. Goals are the actions that visitors complete on your website. There are different types of goals you can setup in PageSense to measure how well each aspect of your site is doing, such as brochure downloads, purchase of products, or form submissions. Based on the figures you obtain, you can analyze if the goal conversions are satisfactory for the amount of traffic that you receive from the website, how the goal has performed across a variety of channels or web pages, and whether there's a way to increase your goals and traffic that you aren't utilizing.
  
  For example, let's you want to track how many of the visitors arriving at your website pages complete the 'Sign up' form on your site. In this case, the goal completion metric can provide you information on how many of the visitors were converted into customers, and which traffic sources or pages contribute to the final conversions, adding to the success of your business. 
  

• Drill down more precise set of audience data
  If you’re a marketer who just sticks with the basic view of your audience data to analyze the performance and traffic flow on your website, then there is another major benefit of using web analytics in PageSense that can turn you into the best marketer: filtering reports based on niche audience segments. This option can help you isolate your report's data with regards to a specific group of visitor conditions like visitor's demographics (age, location, gender), the visitor type (new and returning), the device used (mobile and desktop), day of the week, traffic sources, and many more. It also acts as a powerful feature for focusing on the data that matters the most for your business. You can get a better understanding of how the behavior, characteristics, and needs of your audience differ from others on your site. Using this customized report, you can plan better marketing strategies targeted to a specific audience group that has a higher possibility of converting on your website. 

  For example, let's say you're receiving a huge number of traffic from social media sites, and now you want to analyze your data based on the traffic generated from YouTube. You can filter your analytics report to only view data from YouTubers by selecting Source under the Segment Audience, and entering the condition and value as ‘equals’ and ‘YouTube.com.

Web analytics in PageSense can give you a wealth of information about your website visitors in a matter of minutes. 

To set up web analytics in PageSense, install the PageSense' code snippet in the <head> tag of your website pages you want to track your visitors data. PageSense will now start automatically tracking all your website metrics under the ANALYTICS tab (on the left pane). Among other things, this data can tell you:

Once you get a whole picture of the key performance indicators on your website, you can start exploring the why and how part of the website analytics using the variety of CRO tools available in PageSense, such as funnel analysis, heatmap, session recordings, A/B testing, and more.

Categories of web analytics in PageSense

Your web analytics measures many crucial web metrics that can help you understand your visitor's action and behavior on your site. They are grouped into the following major categories:

01. Acquisition analytics are all about where your traffic comes from or how you obtain visitors to your website. This report can be incredibly useful for understanding the various marketing tactics that encourage visitors to your website. Some of the fine levels of insight you can extract from your acquisition reports include:

1. Where you acquired users from?
   
2. What the different channels or sources of traffic to your site are?
   
3. How much of your web traffic comes from search engine hits, paid search clicks, direct traffic, and others?
   
4. Which locations most of the traffic comes from?
   

As you spend a good deal of money and time to attract customers to your site through online advertising, search engine placement, and email campaigns, the acquisition reports can tell you which efforts are most successful and which are not. 

02. Behavior analytics focus on how your visitors use and navigate on your website. It refers to the behavior and the engagement level of your customers who've reached your website. Some of the questions that your behavior metrics can provide answers to include: 

1. Which pages do people frequently visit on your website?
   
2. Where do they bounce off from?
   
3. What pages do they land or leave your site from (entrance and exit pages)?
   
4. How long do people stay on your site (time on page)?
   
5. Are certain web pages viewed more often than others (page views)?