How Analytics Can Help You Improve Your Site and Increase Conversions

Regardless of your overall goals, it’s crucial to keep track of your site’s performance. Without doing so, you may be failing to engage your visitors and lose out on sales as a result.

This is where analytics come in. By tracking site data – including visitor demographics, behaviors, and interactions – you can easily gain insight into your visitors’ wants and needs. Armed with this information, you can then improve your website.

In this post, we’ll further discuss the importance of site analytics. Then we’ll highlight three ways analytics can improve your site and increase conversions, as well as how to get the most informed website data with such tools as Google Analytics and our own Popup Maker WordPress plugin. Let’s get started!

The Importance of Analytics for Your Website

Firstly a definition. When we talk about website analytics, we mean the measurement and collection of site data for the sole purpose of optimizing your layout and content. Simply put, it’s information you can use to improve your website and increase conversions.

Analytics can provide you with information you perhaps didn’t realize you needed to know. This information is useful for any website, including e-commerce sites, blogs, and more. To better understand the importance of analytics, let’s take a closer look at what it can tell you:

• Who is visiting your site: This can help you to narrow your target audience, and create content for them.
• Where your visitors came from: You can learn whether your marketing strategies (for example, on social media) are working.
• What your visitors did on your site: This helps you to better optimize your site and its content, along with giving you insight into how visitors interact with it.

In the end, the goal is improve visitor engagement. By studying the elements mentioned above, using analytics can help you improve your website and increase conversions.

How Analytics Can Help You Improve Your Site and Increase Conversions (In 3 Ways)

If you want to get a better grip on website analytics, it helps to know exactly how they can improve your site. That’s why we’ve put together three key ways analytics can help you. Let’s jump in!

1. They Can Provide You With Detailed Visitor Demographics

In short, visitor demographics tells you who your site’s visitors are. For example, data such as age, gender, and location are typically collected (among others) and it can be helpful in learning more about your audience.

As you might expect, this information helps you to better understand who you should be tailoring your content to. Fortunately, there are a number of free tools to help you collect information on your visitors – a major player being Google Analytics.

Once you’ve added your website to your analytics account, you’ll have a variety of stats at your fingertips. However, we’re going to focus on the demographics and interests data. You’ll firstly need to enable demographics, then wait up to 24 hours for data to appear in your Demographics and Interests tabs:

While the information available initially will be sparse, the tool will begin to collect demographic information from this point on. You’ll then be able to use it to track age and gender, as well as location and language.

Aside from audience demographics, Google Analytics offers so much more. You can learn almost everything about how your site is used, and this is invaluable as a website owner.

2. You Can Ascertain Your Visitor’s Behaviors

When visitors land on your website, there are certain things they’ll be likely to do based on your site’s layout and their reason for visiting. These actions are known as ‘behaviors’ and are important to understand.

Knowing your visitor’s behaviors can benefit you greatly. Such behaviors include the way they view your content (such as the ‘F-pattern’), any site navigation trends, and much more. With this information, you can then build or tweak your site based upon documented behaviors.

Being able to track visitor behaviors may seem like magic, but there are tools at your disposal to do so. Heatmaps are one example, and they enable you to see how visitors interact with your web page through recorded screen sessions. You’ll normally want to track mouse clicks and movements, although scrolling patterns and eye movement tracking is becoming increasingly popular. At first though, it’s best to focus on aspects that have a direct and immediate result on conversions. These include Call To Action (CTA) placements and page design. However, you can eventually get into content improvement and even image optimization to further improve user experience.

To get started, we recommend you use a full-featured tool, such as Inspectlet. You’ll be able to get a good idea of current visitor behaviors, and this will inform you as to the decisions and changes you should make going forward. You can also use Google Analytics to track visitor behavior. Features such as the Behavior Flow report can help you to gain a better understanding of user actions and how they impact your site.

3. They Can Help You Learn How Your Popups are Performing

Many site owners consider popups as a ‘set and forget’ aspect of their site. However, the information they can provide will likely be invaluable when it comes to increasing site conversions.

Firstly, analytics can give you insight into the various interactions with your popups, and as a result, you can optimize them accordingly (such as their placement or copy, for example). Secondly, analytics can show you how users interact with your popups. You even have the ability to test out various forms of a popup (known as split testing) to ensure optimal performance.

While you may not be able to track your popups’ performance with tools such as Google Analytics, you can do so with Popup Maker’s Popup Analytics extension. Once it’s installed and activated, you’ll notice a few additional columns have been added to the Popup Maker > All Popups screen in your WordPress dashboard. These outline the various metrics the plugin tracks, enabling you to see how they perform at a glance:

As visitors interact with your popups, the stats will update on this screen. What’s more, there are more detailed statistics available in the Analytics tab, and the Analytics & Stats pane in the Popup Editor. This enables you to clearly see how well your popups are performing, and tweak them accordingly.

Conclusion

If you’ve already built a website with the visitor in mind, the thought of making changes to your site may seem absurd. However, it’s important for all sites to take visitor demographics and behaviors into account, and optimize your site further based on your findings. Website analytics enable you to do just that.

In this post, we’ve introduced you to three ways you can improve your site and increase conversions with analytics. To quickly recap, analytics can:

1. Provide you with detailed visitor demographics.
2. Clue you into visitor habits and behaviors.
3. Keep you up to date on your popup’s performance.

Do you have any questions about how to use analytics to improve your site and increase conversions? Let us know in the comments section below!

Image credit: Pexels.