Analytics | Glossary
What is Analytics?
Analytics is the process of collecting and interpreting data or statistics. There are four types of analytics:
Descriptive - Analytics looks at current data to determine existing trends and patterns.
Diagnostic - This takes descriptive analytics deeper by analyzing why the current trends exist.
Predictive - Predictions about future trends and patterns are made based on past data.
Prescriptive - After interpretation and analysis, data is used to determine what steps should be taken next.
For example, analytics is frequently used in web and content creation to help you see how well your content is performing so you can make informed decisions about future content.
Because it is broad and data-driven, analytics can be complex to collect and analyze. Therefore, many people use a third-party tool, such as Google Analytics. Analytic tools typically measure many different facets of user activity on your site. These metrics can include:
- Page views — Helps measure your content’s visibility and accessibility.
- Bounce rate — Shows how often users leave your website before exploring other pages.
- Demographics — Data which shows your users characteristics like age and gender.
- Entrances — Tracks where people first land on your website. Do they start on your homepage or enter from a link to a different page?
- Exit rate — Determines how frequently people exit your website from specific pages.
- Organic traffic — Shows the number of people who find your content independently instead of through ads or referrals.
- Web traffic sources — Allows you to understand where your users are coming from and how they find you.
- Session duration — Measures how long someone spends on your website can provide insight into their level of engagement.
- New and returning users — Shows how many of your users are visiting yours site or a piece of content for the first time as well as those who have visited your site before.
Benefits of Analytics
Analytics is beneficial because it helps you understand how well users connect with your content and how you can meet your business goals. It allows you to identify areas for improvement and then track and evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies. This prevents wasted resources such as time, money, and effort, from being used on ineffective methods. Here are some examples of how the improvement and evaluation process can work with analytics:
Looking at specific metrics, you may realize that some of your content shows high engagement levels while others are underperforming. Without analytics, you may miss out on important information about your users.
For example, if you have a website focused on mental health resources, you may find that your users engage well with your blog posts about depression. You discover this by analytics tracking how many people view the blog, leave comments, and further explore your website. You realize, however, that your audience is significantly less interested in blog posts about anxiety. These posts have views, but readers don’t spend more than five seconds on them.
This information is vital in understanding your audience. Not only can you pinpoint what content your readers valued in the past, but you can tailor your future content to meet their needs. You may identify what keywords appear most in successful blog posts and begin to plan content around those. You use this strategy to help generate content suited to your readers.
In addition to better understanding your audience, you can use analytics to track your key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI measures how close you are to your specific goal. KPIs include website traffic, clicks, leads, engagement, and conversions.
For example, your goal may be to increase subscriptions to your blog by 25% monthly. Your current KPI reveals that 5% of readers subscribe. You put a couple of strategies to bolster the number of subscriptions, such as adding a tagline to blog posts reminding people to subscribe. You then track your subscriptions metric through analytics and notice the number has improved but hasn’t reached your goal. You add a big, red subscribe button at the end of every blog post. By the end of the second month, you’ve almost reached your goal of increasing your subscriptions by 25%. As you monitor and adjust your strategy, you can use analytics to understand its effectiveness.
Getting Started with Analytics
Analytics is powerful but can be overwhelming to navigate on your own. It helps you evaluate and improve your content by measuring your audience"s connection to your content and giving insight into specific metrics tied to your KPIs. Furthermore, you can adapt your strategies as needed and see their effectiveness. Only some may need to use a comprehensive range of metrics; you may only be interested in a few, such as traffic and conversions.
You can start by tracking some of these basic metrics (traffic, likes, subscribes, sales). Many platforms, such as WordPress, have built-in data so you can begin to look at the analytics on your own. You may start by focusing on traffic and testing different strategies, such as ads or search engine optimization (SEO). You can use the traffic data to determine if those strategies bring more people to your site.
As you grow more comfortable using data, you may explore other metrics in greater depth. However, you often need to use a third-party tool to explore complex data. Analytics tools can help you see trends and patterns by providing graphs and charts. This makes the information more digestible. For example, if you track returning users, you can watch the trend go up or down based on recent website updates. Analytics tools can help you break down and understand the data better, improving your decision-making.
If you require analytics, tools like Scripted Analytics can help you make informed decisions about your content. If you want to know more about Scripted Analytics and determine how it aligns with your business’s goals, you can click here to enroll in a free membership and schedule a demo today.
Recommended Readings
Have more questions about analytics and related tools? Check out these four articles:
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