What is Web Analytics 2022?

If only companies could read minds, but that’s not quite possible. The next best thing is observing your target audience virtually. 

Web Analytics is utilized by eCommerce companies to optimize their website performance. Organizations can use website analytics software to collect data on user experience (UX) and make changes to maximize their satisfaction. Teams can even improve their site’s visibility to search engines and launch marketing campaigns. 

Web analytics data can be the key to unlocking the potential for startups just beginning and for more established web platforms that want to improve their reach. Here we discuss how web analytics works, and what you can achieve with it.

What Is Web Analytics?

Web analytics is basically web traffic data analysis. Software for website analysis performs data collection and analyzes user interaction with your website. This means teams can actually see real-time data that can enlighten customer behavior. 

Digital marketing teams can use their website data to meet business goals as well as even update their virtual platform’s search engine optimization (SEO). When eCommerce teams update their SEO, they can boose their online presence. 

Their website will become much more visible to search engines. This means their target audience will be able to find them. After updating your site and optimizing it for user experience, you can expand your reach on social media to pull in more web traffic. 

For a quick overview of web analytics, see the short introduction video below.

What Are The Different Types Of Web Analytics?

Website analytics tools can analyze two important areas. There is the web pages of your site and then there is your online presence. Your number of visitors is equally reliant on your website and your industry market and competitors. 

On-Site Web Analytics	Off-Site Web Analytics
The micro-focus on your website content and user behavior.	The macro-focus on your industry ranking, competitors, and the industry online as a whole.

Web analysis tools can gather powerful analytics data in and outside of your web platform. For the macro data they world be pulling from related sites, social media, and review sites similar the business intelligence tools. When it comes to your own site it takes into account key metrics. We discuss types of key metrics in the next section.

What Can Web Analytics Do?

Website analytics is mainly used to track metrics so marketing platforms can improve website performance. Key metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to statistically measure progress made on your business goals. Examples of key metrics include the number of visitors to landing pages, the bounce rate on any web pages, and the conversion rate at checkout. 

Web analytics tools can also offer help to upgrade the functionality of your website. With A/B testing teams work on the accessibility and usability of their site..

In the table are examples of some of the things a web analytics platform can do. It includes key metrics and other ways analysis tools that can improve your site.

Conversion Rate	Bounce Rate	Retention	Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The conversion rate is your total conversion divided by the number of website visitors.  Conversion / # of visitors = conversion rate	The bounce rate is the number of page sessions divided by the total of sessions. Single-page sessions / total sessions = bounce rate	Visitor retention metrics are usually presented as a retention report that shows unique visitors who returned at least once.	The number of times your ad is clicked divided by the number of times your ad is seen (called an impression).  Clicks / impressions = CTR
Average Time on Single Page	Referrals	Usability	A/B Testing
The amount of time all users spend on each web page averaged.	Referral traffic comes from another site that had an outbound link to yours.	Ensuring your website is fast and easy to navigate.	Tests two versions of a web page with users.

Conversion is your end goal for your end-user. For eCommerce the end goal is sales. If your sales for the month are 250 and the total visitors you have are 5,000 your conversion rate is 0.05%. 

With a web analytics tool, you can work to increase your conversion rate by collecting data about site visitors. This data can be the time they spend on each page and how quickly they leave the site. You can use the metrics to figure out how to improve satisfaction.

The bounce rate is the percentage of people that visit your site and then leave before your desired action. Google Analytics offers a very detailed report on bounce rate and how it works here. One quick tip many blogs forget is make sure outbound links open in a separate tab that way you can keep readers on your site as long as possible. 

Retention in web analytics refers to the rate of return visitors. The way the retention rate is calculated can be tricky but many web analytics provide you a cohort of this data. Adobe Analytics gives a detailed explanation of their report works here. 

The click-through rate is the number of times someone clicks on your website ad. This is a pretty important indicator to know how your ads are doing. Not all analytics tools calculate this for you. You can find more about CTR from Google Analytics here. Note that Google Analytics is one of the platforms that does not calculate it for you. 

The average time on a page literally means the number of time visitors spent on each web page. This is calculated by most analytics tools. If you want more info about this metric HubSpot offers statistics like the average time spent on web pages per industry here.

Referrals in web analytics are when another website refers to yours. Referral traffic is the total traffic you received from referrals by other websites. 

Usability and web accessibility are the hidden gems of user experience and satisfaction. Usability is about ensuring your site functionality and navigation are intuitive for users so they can actually complete the desired action. Web Accessibility is closely related to usability because if your website isn’t accessible to those with disabilities then they literally can’t use the site and perform the desired action. 

Web analytics can help you improve your usability by helping you figure out what changes to improve navigation to the end goal. Web analytics normally do not offer web accessibility metrics, you would need to make those improvements manually. See our web accessibility article here.

A/B testing is offered by many web analytics platforms. In web analytics what you are split testing is usually two versions of a web page with users to see which one performs better. This can be extremely useful for usability, accessibility, and overall conversions. You can find more in-depth information about website a/b testing on Optimizely and Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg is a web analytics platform and Optimizely is an A/B testing platform.

Below we have a tutorial on how to develop your KPIs for your business goals. 

What Are Examples of Web Analytics Tools?

Web analysis tools can be varied in what they offer and their overall costs. Some of the most popular ones, Google Analytics has a widely used free version for basic website metrics. Popular A/B testing ones include Crazy Egg while customer-focused analytics tools include Adobe Analytics and Kissmetrics. 

Adobe Analytics  trScore: 8.4/10	Google Analytics  trScore: 8.6/10	Kissmetrics  trScore: 8.3/10	Crazy Egg trScore: 8.8/10
They are analytics platforms for analyzing the customer journey and offering insight like predictive reporting.	They are a web analytics platforms that collects web traffic data and analyzing it.	They are an analytics tool that is dedicated to the customer lifecycle and customer segmentation.	They are an analytics platform that specializes in a/b testing and heatmaps.
No upfront pricing	Starting $0 (Free plan)	Starting $299/month	Starting $29/mo

When it comes to finding a tool that fits your budget there is plenty of affordable ones to choose from. You can also combine paid tools with free ones. Crazy Egg has a guide for pulling data from Google Analytics that you can find here. 

More Resources

If you want to see more website analysis tools we have a couple of different lists of software available. We offer related software under the categories of web analytics, digital analytics, conversion rate optimization, and eCommerce analytics.

Avid learners always want more reading materials so we also recommend these articles. HubSpot’s blog has an awesome beginner introduction to web analytics and TechTarget is perfect for more in-depth learning. Clean.io’s blog goes into some major eCommerce benefits. Below we also a full-length course on Web Analytics offered by Simplilearn. 

For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.