What is web analytics? - YouTube

In this video, we'll be going over what web analytics is.

We'll give a quick overview of the kinds of insights it can give you,

and give you a taste for how to get started with analytics yourself.

Here's a quick look at how it worked for Rachel's online business:

Rachel's Kitchen.

As an owner of an e-commerce website,

you know that website inside and out,

and therefore you make lots of assumptions about the user experience,

about the journey that a customer might take through the site.

You're kind of too close to it be objective,

so a tool like analytics gives you real information,

real data on user experience

like what page they are coming into the site on, how long they're spending,

where they going on the site, and if they're leaving.

OK, let's get started.

So, what is Web Analytics exactly?

Well, it's all about using the data you can collect from your website

to give you insights about your business.

There are lots of web analytics tools out there,

and they can do a variety of things.

Since we're just getting started, we'll focus on the basics,

and talk about ways analytics can help you no matter which specific tool you use.

Web Analytics helps you by providing data.

First, let's look at the different types of data.

Let's start with a metric.

This is basically anything you can count,

such as unique visitors or time spent on site.

Now, these are two great examples:

If you sell things on your website, you can track how much money you're making

or how many products you're selling.

If your goal is to get people to read your website,

you can track the number of times somebody looked at a blog post,

or the amount of time that they spent on it.

All of these are called metrics.

You'll generally analyze your metrics by using what are called dimensions.

That's another type of data.

But let's come back to that in just a minute.

When you are first starting out with analytics

you might feel like you are swimming in an ocean of metrics.

But you'll quickly get used to navigating all this data.

So, what do you do with it?

Well, you can use web analytics tools

to learn more about your website's visitors.

There are lots of things that you might want people to do on your website,

such as placing an order,

or getting directions to your shop,

or even filling out a contact form.

This is known as a conversion.

Your conversion rate is the amount of people that visit your site

and then convert on one of your goals.

Web analytics tools can tell you if your conversion rate changes,

based on where they came from, whether they'd been there before,

or even the type of device they are using.

So, let's look at that last one.

If you know your site is working well on certain devices,

but not on others,

you can identify specific strengths to build on,

and any areas you might want to improve.

You'll notice in that example that we were comparing metrics of conversions,

or conversion rates.

And we were breaking it down by the device they used.

The device data we're collecting is called a dimension,

and as promised, let's talk about that now.

Generally, a dimension is any kind of data

you can use to describe something you're tracking, with words.

Dimensions include things like device type,

the browsers visitors use, their geographic location,

and much, much more.

By taking your metrics and slicing them with dimensions,

you can find answers to very specific detailed business questions,

like, "Which devices are people finding it easiest

to convert on the goals of my website?"

And, that's just one of many questions you can get answered with web analytics.

Here's another one.

If you want to know what time of day most people visit your website,

take your visitors metric and break that down by the hour of day dimension.

Or perhaps you want to find out which marketing campaigns

are making the most sales.

Take your conversions metric and break it down by a campaign dimension.

As you deep-dive into your own web analytics reports

you'll be able to see which metrics and dimensions are being tracked,

and you can then combine them-- slice and dice them--

to answer the questions that you care most about.

If you haven't started with an analytics tool yet,

you'll probably want to choose one to install.

And most have a pretty similar set-up.

First, you need to copy and paste some special code onto your web pages.

The analytics tool will then start tracking a lot of things on its own,

but you might want to configure them

to track specific things that are unique to your business, and your goals.

Hopefully you're getting excited about all the amazing insights

you can get from web analytics tools.

It's another important tool in your online arsenal.

If this is seems like a lot to take in, don't worry.

Just stick with us.

We're going to be covering all the terminology and the basics

of how you can use web analytics

to measure how you're doing with digital.

We'll show you how to see whether visitors convert on your goals,

and how to find out which kinds of visitors

perform better than others.

On top of that, we'll even go into using analytics

to measure and improve your paid, and organic, search engine campaigns.