How to use analytics to improve your website customer experience

Customer analytics is the process and technology that organises and interprets gathered data to reflect the demographics, actions, and habits of your customers. This data can provide unique, actionable insights that can transform the way you run your sales, marketing, and customer service departments. It can impact your entire business.

Website Analytics

Traffic source

As well as knowing your top level traffic numbers, you should also know where your traffic is coming from. Again, this information is available using a tool like Google Analytics.

Google Analytics breaks down your website traffic sources into four broad categories:

1. Organic Search: traffic coming via the search engines
2. Referral: traffic from another website
3. Direct: traffic typing your domain into the browser
4. Social: traffic from social media

Each source of traffic will tell you a few important snippets of information about your website.

Even if SEO is less prevalent than it used to be, the organic search traffic will give you an idea of how well your website ranks in the search engines. With around 40,000 searches per second on Google alone, the search engines will always be an important source of traffic, and this metric will tell you how effective your SEO strategy is.

Which source of traffic is best? Well, that’s hard to say, and will depend on what type of website you run. However, I would always be more comfortable if my traffic came from a variety of sources. This minimizes the risk of your website being decimated if your main traffic source dries up.

Search engine optimisation

SEO analytics is the process of collecting and analysing raw data to better inform your search engine optimisation efforts. It helps you to prioritise tasks, get approval for SEO campaigns, and make better decisions to improve SEO.

1. Plan your work
2. Set up the right measurement tools
3. Set up dashboards and reports
4. Review and act on the data

Whether you’re optimising a personal blog or multimillion eCom site, the insights you’ll gain from analytics should be at the core of your approach to defining and improving performance.

Loading speed

From a visitor standpoint, no one likes slow-loading webpages (you can probably relate). It doesn’t matter how amazing your content is or how beautiful your website looks; if it takes more than a few seconds for your webpage to load, most people will leave and never come back – much less convert. In many cases, improving loading speed requires optimising images, JavaScript, or HTTP requests. A slow-loading webpage will compromise the user experience and kill conversions better than anything else.

User behaviour

User behaviour analytics are a set of marketing and SEO metrics that give us insight into what behaviours users are taking when they come across your website. A handful of inbound marketing analytics fall under the umbrella of user behaviour, including click-through rate, dwell time, time on site, time on page, bounce rate and pages per session.

Click-Through Rate

In the context of user behaviour analytics, click-through rate is the percentage of search engine users who click through to a page of your website when it appears in a list of search engine results. These clicks occur after the user has entered a search for a keyword phrase or query. A high click-through rate is a signal to Google that users find your ranking website page interesting and relevant enough to visit it. As a result, Google and other search engines tend to rank pages with high click-through rates more favourably than pages with low click-through rates.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is another important user behaviour metric to review when evaluating the success of your marketing strategy. Essentially, dwell time means the average amount of time a user spends on a website page they’ve found through the search results before clicking “back” to return to the results. Dwell time is a user behaviour metric roughly measured as a blend of bounce rate and time on site.  

Bounce Rate

Your website’s bounce rate is a data point that indicates the percentage of users who land on a website page and then leave without navigating to any other page on your site. A high bounce rate can indicate that users aren’t finding useful information relevant to their search when they encounter your website’s content. A high bounce rate can also be a signal of a misaligned page title/meta description and web page content.

Conversions

Conversion rate is another crude top-level metric, but it’s arguably the most important metric of all as it can have a significant impact on your site’s profitability—if you can increase your conversion rate from 1% to 2%, your profits double. Total conversion numbers are important, but it’s the conversion rate that tells you how well you encourage your traffic to perform a desired action. Your conversion rate is easy to calculate: Unique Visitors / Conversions

You can also track how your conversion rate changes over time using Google Analytics. Now, what qualifies as a conversion will vary from site to site, and you could also have many different conversion “goals” on one site. For example, an eCommerce store might have three conversion goals:

1. A sale (most important!)
2. A subscriber to an email list
3. A social share (least important, but still valuable)

The higher the conversion rate, the better your website is doing. A low conversion rate indicates that you are attracting the wrong traffic, your call to action is weak, and/or your sales copy is ineffective.

Sales

Sales analysis involves analysing the sales made by a company over a period of time. Many companies have a weekly sales analysis, a monthly sales analysis or a quarterly sales analysis. A regular sales analysis helps the company understand where they are performing better and where they need to improve.

Analytics Tools

There are plenty of tools that can turn  collected information into an easy-to-understand report that gives you insight into your unique web visitors. When you are armed with this knowledge, you get to see how effective your website is and what changes you need to make in order to make it even better.

Here are some of our picks:

Hotjar

Hotjar is a product experience insights tool that gives you behavior analytics and feedback data to help you empathise with and understand your customers through tools like Heatmaps, Session Recordings, Surveys, and a Feedback widget.

Hotjar complements the data and insights you get from traditional product and web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel. It’s an industry-leading and easy-to-use service that combines product experience insights, user behaviour analysis, and customer feedback to help you connect the dots between what's happening on your site, and why it happens.

Google analytics

Google Analytics is a website traffic analysis application that provides real-time statistics and analysis of user interaction with the website. Google analytics enables website owners to analyze their visitors, with the objective of interpreting and optimising website’s performance. Google analytics can track all forms of digital media and referring upstream web destinations, banner and contextual advertisements, e-mail and integrates with other Google products.

The data provided by Google analytics is designed especially for marketing and webmasters alike in gauging the quality of traffic they are receiving and the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Hubspot

HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, boost ROI and optimize your inbound marketing strategy to generate more, qualified leads.

Everything from hosting your website to blogging, social media posting, email marketing, and more, were combined on one single platform that can be accessed from anywhere. That way, every marketer in a company can use HubSpot's tools to nurture qualified leads until they are ready to pass on to the sales team. When a lead is ready to convert, they're easily passed onto the sales team for a simple, seamless experience that helps companies turn warm leads into happy customers.

Semrush‍

Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. Our tools and reports are able to help marketers that work in the following services: SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, Campaign Management.

The value of Semrush lies in the wide range of tools available - the software contains over 40 tools for SEO as well as content, advertising, competitive research, reporting and social media management. This way, you can manage all aspects of a website’s online visibility through Semrush. Gather SEO insights, research competitors, use our content tools to create new pages, build links,  run ads, and promote your new material on social media -- all using Semrush tools.

Learn more about Hotjar

Check out this quick intro to Hotjar to learn how it works.

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