Website analytics implementation is essential when it comes to your online business presence optimization, and there are many advantages to using web analytics. However, many creative or photography business owners overlook the importance of Web analytics.
The options often seem overwhelming to newly established business owners when they learn about website analytics for the first time.
Even though most business owners have a feeling web analytics could help their business grow, the task to choose the proper analytics platform for their photography or creative business sometimes feels too much to undertake.
For those businesses having a budget at their disposal to find an expert to implement the right analytics program, I encourage you to do so. Even with a limited budget you could outsource the task of analytics implementation, or find, audit, and implement your preferred analytics platform. However, almost all clients I work or had worked with on their custom Showit, ProPhoto, and WordPress websites used and are still using Google Analytics. And, since it is a Google platform it is not a surprise at all how fairly easy is to install and set up Google Analytics on your Showit, ProPhoto, or WordPress website.
In this article, I’m not going to get into how to implement a specific Website Analytics platform on your site, but the reasons why you absolutely should implement one. Below you will find a web analytics overview, what can web analytics tell you, the reasons why you should implement website analytics to help you in growing your business, and why analytics is important for an online business.
Table of Contents
- The Reasons Why Website Analytics is Important for your business growth
- 1 | Get Metrics for Your Business
- 2 | Improve User Experience
- 3 | Improve your Marketing and Pricing Strategy
- 4 | Visual overview
- 5 | Find out Who Your Visitors Are
- 6 | Find out Hot Topics
- 7 | Uncovering Trends and Social Media
- 8 | Measure your site performance
- 9 | Custom reports and dashboards
- 10 | Set conversion goals
- Key Takeaway – Reasons why Website Analytics is important for your business growth
The Reasons Why Website Analytics is Important for your business growth
1 | Get Metrics for Your Business
Let me just say this – Any business without metrics is blind, no matter if it is a creative, photography, or another business type.
Without tracking key performance indicators and tracking visitor data, you, as a business owner, may miss the right information to reach clients or customers for your online photography or creative business presence.
Times are over when getting your business online was the only thing you needed and you got yourself – visitors, bookings, or sales.
The Internet became an overcrowded marketplace to compete on.
Getting your website analytics metrics will provide you with information to help you learn more about your business. In addition to this, making decisions and quickly + easily adapting to any market trends or changes are other benefits of implementing website analytics on your business’ website.
2 | Improve User Experience
Having the information about site usage, performance, and visitor interactions will empower your business with the metrics to better understand what visitors want, need or experience a problem with.
This will aid you in solving the problems visitors experience while browsing your website. By solving the common problems your visitors come across, you will also learn more about your dream clients, too.
3 | Improve your Marketing and Pricing Strategy
Ensuring you track data properly will help you conveniently reach your audience, provide tailored offers, and learn about visitors’ wants and needs.
Implementation of Web Analytics will help you in spotting new interests, and trends, and will aid you in reviewing and improving your offering, products, or services.
You will be able to even find out if your visitors got to your site searching for a product you don’t currently offer. And, this will help you in unveiling new potentials for growing and expanding your business.
4 | Visual overview
Most, if not all, web analytics platforms give you a dashboard with a visual overview of visitors’ data with different sorts of charts. By using visual overviews you can spot and track your data with ease.
When it comes to reporting and visual interpretation of data, you should be able to configure your settings and define a report with key metrics relevant to your specific photography or creative business needs.
5 | Find out Who Your Visitors Are
One of the main reasons for Website Analytics implementation is the fact you can find out who your visitors are.
When you set up analytics, you will be able to tell where your traffic comes from and see who visits your website.
One of the biggest gains from utilizing web analytics on your website is the possibility to get demographic data.
Demographic information is very useful when it comes to tailoring your offer and content to your target audience.
Sometimes you may even get surprised by an unexpected demographic interested in your topics, and discover new potentials for business growth.
6 | Find out Hot Topics
Essential for running an online presence for your photography or creative business is making sure your content appeals to and is relevant to your dream client.
Your content should be interesting and engaging to the targeted audience or niche.
With analytics, you will be able to find which topics your visitors consider relevant or have an interest in. This will provide an insight into what kind of content you should create.
Producing fresh content, relevant to visitors’ interests assures getting repeated visits. In most cases, this leads to an increase in site engagement. And, if calls to action are optimized and implemented throughout your website an increase in conversion rates, too.
7 | Uncovering Trends and Social Media
Web Analytics implementation helps to spot emerging trends and gives an overview of where your content is accessed for any social media channel.
Over time you can spot trends in your web analytics platform. By spotting trends in your traffic you can gather data and design a social marketing strategy, assure you engage the most on the social media platform your audience concentrates on.
Additionally, discovering trends such as low-volume traffic for a certain period would allow you to analyze your marketing efforts, competition, campaigns, etc.
If a sudden traffic decrease is spotted and is consistent with a certain period, you may reserve this time for planning, improving, and developing your business goals.
8 | Measure your site performance
With all of the information and data website analytics providers, you will be able to improve, plan, change, and adapt your site. This inevitably and in time will lead to improved performance.
Of course, there are more dependencies for site performance but using metrics to improve is one of the most overlooked ways by creative business owners and photographers.
While understanding each term regarding website analytics is important, in this post I am not going to go through all of them.
However, one of the most important is the bounce rate. If your pages have a high bounce rate, this may indicate the content quality may not be very good or your posts contain media mostly with short verbiage. With Website Analytics You will be able to see your bounce rates and use this information to improve your website or blog.
In addition to this, you will be able to track if visitors reach 404 pages or are unable to find specific information. There certainly are many reasons and factors contributing to why the 404 page is reached by your website visitors. Or, why they are unable to find the information they are looking for. Spotting this, alongside various indicators inside a website analytics platform will provide you with metrics you can use to improve your business.
9 | Custom reports and dashboards
Custom dashboards and custom reports inside your website analytics platform should simplify your business reporting process and shorten your decision-making time.
If implemented properly, the custom reports and dashboards will provide your team with metrics to make accurate business decisions and develop marketing plans.
Most web analytics platforms provide default reports and dashboards. However, the default ones may not necessarily work for you or your team members. You will most probably need to spend some time researching and defining with your team members what their needs are. Then you can dive into implementing custom reports and dashboards tailored to your team’s needs.
10 | Set conversion goals
Goals are a great way to measure how well your site fulfills targeted audience objectives.
With your website analytics platform, you should be able to set up individual Goals to track actions, like transactions with a minimum purchase amount, subscriptions to your newsletter, or placing orders.
Conversion goals implementation would provide you with a clear and simple overview of what marketing efforts work for you the most. This will also aid you in better defining, tracking, measuring, and implementing new products and services, improving the existing ones. Or, what are the products you need to push to boost your sales, revenue, and hopefully profits?
Key Takeaway – Reasons why Website Analytics is important for your business growth
When reviewing available website analytics platforms, be sure to check the program requirements. You don’t want to choose a platform that requires technical implementation you don’t have at your disposal.
If you are looking for a simple and online solution ask your business partners or find out what your competition implemented.
When you made a final decision for your analytics platform, make sure you spend some time figuring out which key performance indicators you need to track.
A very good option is to spend some time testing and figuring out what works best for you.
By defining your key metrics, you’ll be able to spot your targeted audience and visitor deviations and implement optimized marketing efforts to improve your business and boost your profits. And always remember – implementing a website analytics platform is an investment in your business growth.
Tell me now, have you implemented website analytics or are you still looking? What do you think is essential for your business that website analytics platforms must provide you with?
Do you feel it is a challenge to implement Website Analytics for your business?
Are there any specific needs you need Web Analytics to provide?
