Web Analytics is a very important part of running a business these days. When you are running a website, it is utmost CRUCIAL to keep a check on your traffic and analyze it. And there are numerous websites that offer you this support.
But before that, what exactly is Web Analytics?
This is a technology designed for website owners to enable them to understand their site much better. It helps to know which part of their website is performing good, and which one needs improvement. You also get to know what kind of content your users are more interested in, and what is totally getting ignored. Besides this, you can determine:
- Total page views by each visitor
- Backlinks
- Duration of stay of each visitor
- What all a visitor clicks after landing on a page
- Referrers
- Entry and Exit Page
- Traffic source
And much more. It is highly likely that you get confused and overwhelmed with the variety of options they provide. So, you might need to hire an expert who can make studying web analytics easy for you. Or, you can wait and explore each option one by one to get a hang of this technology.
Now, how can you analyse the traffic of your website? The most popular players in this field are Google, statcounter, Bitly, etc. Here we will have a look at these 3 players in detail.
Google Analytics
This is a free analytics tool provided by Google. It is the first and go-to choice for every website owner or marketer. There is a plethora of options to explore in Google Analytics. It will automatically fetch important information for you once you enter your website’s name.
You can even set up goals here, which will then become easy to track with navigation provided. One of the best features of this analytics is Goal Funnel, for the websites dealing in e-commerce. Here, you can set up some URL steps that a user should follow to make a purchase. And through this, you can analyse where your website is going wrong when many users abandon after a certain point. Google may add more advanced features like offline data integration in the future, making it even more robust than it already is.
In my honest opinion, Google Analytics is not the simplest platforms for a beginner. Its definitely the most popular one, but its far from being easiest to use. So if you are a newbie, try statcounter instead.
Statcounter.com
This is very simple and easy to use, but also very powerful web analytics tool available on the internet. The basic services are free of cost, while you pay premium for advanced services. This website helps you track and analyse your visitors, enabling you to make efficient decisions.
Some of the best features of statcounter are, tracking customers in real time, optimize content of the page, identify new markets, compare marketing campaigns, and a lot more. You can also get detailed report on your visitor’s activity, and the growth plan based on the data collected from the website.
Bitly
People know Bitly as the link shortener. Many are not much aware of what all this website can do apart from shortening your links. Once you have shortened your links, you can analyse their performance through this platform easily.
This may not be a conventional tracker like Analytics or Statcounter. But with bitly you can track traffic to your pages on 3rd party websites which you do not own.
You can find out the time and number of clicks a certain link got. You get a complete report of your links, which will help you analyse how various pages on your website are performing. This will help you to improve your website more efficiently.