Think of a scenario where you are responsible to make sure that the monthly reports on the corporate website traffic are accurate. Your managers or clients are not going to tolerate it if you submit website traffic reports with errors.
Defining web analytics?
It is the technique of gathering and evaluating the data of a website. The process might be used to help enhance the effectiveness of a website. Web analytics assist you to analyze the paid and organic traffic source, Return on Investment, and bounce rate.
Thus, the process is handy for measuring website traffic and conducting market research and business. For effective optimization of web usage, it is essential to have consistency in measuring and monitoring online visitor data.
If you are able to track the links and analyze the behavior patterns of website visitors and users, you can gain rich insights into the way they interact with the portal. Apart from that, it becomes easier to understand ways of improving communication on any website with the target audiences.
Types of professional reports to generate the website traffic
If you are still uncertain of what kind of reports to generate for measuring website traffic, you may consider these ideas:
- Page views: As is obvious from the name, a report containing page views indicates how the online users view the web pages. This report may also have the count of web pages and online visitor visits before going away from your website.
- Avg time on a web page: You can also have a report on this metric, It indicates the average time users spend on one web page while visiting your website. If a visitor remains on a website for a longer duration, it is a tell-tale sign that the portal has high-quality and engaging content.
- Incoming traffic source: It communicates the origin or source of the website traffic. For instance, online visitors can come to your website through email links or search engines. This is known in Google Analytics as default channel grouping. This could be from social media, organic traffic (Google, etc), email and so on.
- Device usage: Irrespective of how you have built your website, it has to be friendly and responsive to different devices. Thus, the report containing this parameter is crucial as it offers a proper breakdown of the types of devices users use for browsing your website content.
- Landing page report: This report shows which pages users land on as the first page on your website. This is a useful report to help understand which pages are driving traffic and (potentially, more importantly) which pages aren’t.
- Page Value: Understand which pages not only drive traffic but also aid in conversions/goals for your website.
Why do you require these website traffic reports?
These reports can come in handy for a business for several reasons. Some of these are as follows:
- You are working for an organization, which offers priority to insights into portal performance and greater visibility.
- The employee or employees are responsible for mixing web analytics data along with other marketing and sales data. The aim is to understand your website’s performance in a better manner.
- The organization has to monitor a portal’s performance, which has a huge volume of monthly online visitors.
- These reports help to provide actionable insights into your website traffic.
- You are in the marketing department of a business organization or a stand-alone freelance support that needs to demonstrate a return on investment (ROI)
Actionable Insights
It’s important to know and understand where to find the reports – but it’s what to do with that data that is more important. Making changes to drive improvements will lead to:
- Better traffic
- More conversions
- Improved user experience (UX)
The kind of actions you can take off the back of the reports include:
- Making speed improvements to pages that are slow compared to the site average.
- Improving the mobile experience for pages with a high bounce rate / low time on page for mobile viewers.
- Making on-page improvements from an SEO perspective for pages that have seen their traffic drop from a year-on-year (YoY) point of view.
- Look at pages that are driving traffic but not contributing to conversions – are they missing call-to-actions (CTAs) or is the messaging not addressing the user’s pain points?
- Improving and focusing on default channels that help to drive conversions and traffic – taking the resources from other channels that aren’t performing well.
- Or, looking at opportunities to improve the default channels that aren’t delivering the ROI that is expected
- Looking at bounce rate and understanding how that relates to the page – higher than expected? Maybe something needs to be done on-page to improve that initial user experience.
These are just a snapshot of potential actions that you can take when you have generated reports on website traffic. Understanding what is valuable to the organization will help you to know what actions to take and where to prioritize your efforts.
It has become imperative to engage your clients with intelligent Google Analytics reports measuring your website traffic. So, make sure you are using a quality app to generate such reports so that they are accurate and help in informed decision-making.
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