How to Best Utilise Analytics in all its Forms

Featured article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author

Analytics is one of the most indispensable tools any website owner can have. It had gotten to the stage where if you don’t use analytics in some form, your site or company (if it’s web dependant) will fail. I’ve collected the things that I feel are the most important aspects to focus on when looking at your analytics.

Visitor Location Targeting

If you’re a French website, for example, you might assume your readership will be predominantly made up by French citizens, however you might find some very surprising information in your analytics that states you have a massive Polish readership or perhaps lots of people from Bangladesh live for your site. This enables you to cater more to these people and create more inclusive content, which will boost these international page views even more.

Predict the Future

This is an invaluable tool called predictive analytics and is a way for companies and sites to predict what the future holds for them based on past data. So the tool might indicate that during the last week of September you’re click throughs are likely to double. This tool is most helpful for ecommerce sites, but can be deployed on any website to gather some very interesting results.

Click Targets

This is one of the most basic forms of information that analytics offers, however I find that not enough people utilise it like they should. This will show you what people are clicking on most, which will enable you to redesign your site to A) suite these people, and B) engage with new people who will click on it. The practical uses of this are massive, so just have a think how you much you could improve your site if you knew what people were clicking on most.

Best Content

There is a very tired saying in digital marketing, ‘content is king’, however it is true. Whether it’s blog content or on-site content, the written words relating to your site are probably the most important thing, at least in Google’s eyes. The analytics will be able to show you which pages are lingered on and which ones viewers bound off of straight away. This means you can replicate good content and fix any pages that are broken. By showing you the best pages you have, it reveals the worst.

Mobile Ready

Ah, the mobile apocalypse that is destroying home computers (although not really). Most sites do have a mobile counterpart to make it easier for phone surfers, however how can you tell whether that would be money well spent? The analytics will tell you whether a large portion of your readership are looking at your content on their phones or desktops and then you can make an informed decision on whether it would be worth your while to make a mobile sister site. Even if you don’t do it now, chances are you will need to in the next 5 to 10 years.