Who your users are
Whether your organisation has a local or worldwide audience, it helps to understand who they are. Where do they come from? What language do they want to use? Their age? Their gender? These tools can tell you.
This helps you get to know your potential customers in more detail. It shows you how you might want to target any related marketing. You’ll also see the parts of the world where you’re a hit.
The devices they use
People are now using mobile devices, laptops and PCs to access different things at different times. So it’s important to understand specifically how your customers are accessing your website. When you run analytics about what devices your customers are using to visit your website, you’ll be able to tailor your content, design and layout.
Think about how people engage on different devices. Analytics data can tell you about their needs. You may need to tweak your website and campaigns to make sure they work for each device user.
How they found you
Visitors can come from many sources - search engines, social sites, emails etc. They might even have typed your website address directly in their web browser. You can use this data to see the other sites and channels that your customers use, and which ones yield most visitors.
This data also works together with info about which content is getting the most time and attention. With this, you can understand if a recent campaign is bringing more visitors. Plus, it will show if you’re gaining useful interactions with your users instead of them just clicking away or never coming back.
What is their focus?
There’s always a temptation to put absolutely everything you think your users may want to see on your website. This can make it overwhelming and confusing for your visitors when they arrive on your site.
Analytics give detailed information so you can see the content that gets the most attention. You’ll also see how long people are spending on your site.
Usually your homepage gets the most traffic, but what about other popular pages on your website? Are you directing visitors to the right pages? Popular pages could include competitions, blog posts or customer case studies.
Where do they leave?
Do you have visitors who don’t stick around? Do they go away and not come back? You can use analytics to understand where exactly you’re losing them. Then you can decide how you could change the design and user journey, to stop this happening.
This process of understanding and improvement gets you a step closer to the best possible visitor journey every time. So you’ll be turning visitors into users and even promoters of your organisation much more easily.
You can also check the number of abandoned shopping carts or people who’ve downloaded information but haven’t since returned to your website.
If you capture this data, you can think about how to entice the customer back. Would a nudge email close the sale, or could you make it easier to sign up as a volunteer?
