Web analytics

With a web analysis you evaluate the user behaviour on a website. Key performance indicators can be used to identify areas for improvement and eliminate weaknesses.

Definition

The goal of web analytics is to evaluate user behavior on your website. You can do web analytics to find out where your website has strengths and weaknesses. By identifying various Key Performance Indicators (KPI), you can increase the efficiency of your site and continuously monitor your success. It should be the objective starting point for improvements, such as search engine optimization.

For a web analysis there are different tools, like the software Piwik or Matomo – but also free web analysis tools or professional agencies.

The basis for web analytics: the KPI’s

For a web analysis you can use different key performance indicators (KPI). KPI is an abbreviation for Key Performance Indicator. These show you the surfing behavior of your users with the bspw. potential for improvement can be analysed.

By comparing the following KPIs with your targets or industry-typical values, they always have varying degrees of significance.

• Page Impressions (PI): The number of all views of your website.
• Number of visitors: The number of all visitors to your website. This is where it gets more specific, because unlike PI, it becomes clear here if a user visits your site regularly. With this you can see the first information for the success of your site.
• Dwell time: How interesting is your website? Is it designed to be exciting? Do your users not only come regularly, but do they browse your offer with interest?
• Popular user paths: If you can track through conversion tracking which path your user chooses through your website, you can see where the architecture of your site is clear – and where it is impractical.
• Page Value: How important is your subpage for your conversion rate? If you recognize which page works best, you can optimize other pages that way. An A/B test is particularly suitable for this purpose.

Not all of these KPIs distinguish between your human users and automated calls. Crawlers can manipulate your page impressions and visitor numbers if you don’t take technical measures to prevent this. Also, by monitoring your traffic over the long term, you can determine when there are increased calls from bots. If your page views suddenly spike, bots are probably the reason.

Goals of the web analysis

With an extensive web analysis you determine many different key figures. You can use this to make improvements and apply the information gained to your site’s goals and set priorities. Typical goals of your analysis are an increase of your visitor numbers, your conversion rate optimization or an improvement of the user friendliness.

To achieve these improvements, you need to consider key points. If you are aware of what your target audience is looking for in your website, you can ask yourself what information needs you are not meeting. If your offer is good, might there be other reasons why you have a too high Bounce rate too high? Is your website perhaps confusing, do long loading times bother you or do you have a complicated page architecture?

A good web analysis is also always an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of your site.

Relevance for SEO

Not all points of web analytics are equally interesting for search engine optimization (SEO). For SEO, you pay close attention to factors that are important for optimizing your website for search engines.

To achieve a high position on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), it is especially important that you work on your keywords, backlinks, technical SEO and much more. The more visitors come to your site through a search engine, the more important SEO becomes for your site.

Conclusion

Careful web analytics captures user behavior with a variety of metrics. In order to draw useful conclusions from these KPIs, you need to know your target audience as well as possible, while keeping in mind the different specifications of your industry. Only then can you use these values to formulate goals to work on the strengths and weaknesses of your website. By monitoring your users over the long term and repeatedly analyzing your KPI, you can tell when the actions you’re taking to optimize your site’s OnPage and OffPage are working.