To grow a website or online business, you need to understand how it’s performing first. Website analytics reports show you exactly what’s going on, where improvements can be made, and where you’re succeeding. However, creating an effective website analytics report is no easy feat. You have to extract the correct set of data depending on your business goals, such as conversion or awareness, to produce a relevant report. To help you out, we’ve put together a list of tips for creating an ultra-detailed report on website analytics. By following these tips, you’ll be able to create a report that will help you make sense of and improve your website’s performance.
1. Know Your Goal
Web analytics have significant benefits for your business, such as establishing your digital brand or increasing web traffic. However, before you start creating your report, you need to know what you want to achieve with it. What are you hoping to learn from the data? What do you want to improve?
Answering these questions will help you determine what data to collect and how to present it. Otherwise, you’ll likely end up with a lot of data that doesn’t really tell you anything useful.
These goals may be:
- To increase website traffic;
- To improve conversion rates;
- To reduce bounce rates.
Based on those goals, your analytics may contain different sections like “traffic sources” or “landing pages.”
2. Choose the Right Data
When it comes to analytics reports, what you leave out is just as important as what you include. This is where defining your goal comes in. Remember, you want your report to be useful. So, only include data that will help you achieve your goal. So if your goal is to reduce bounce rates, then you won’t need to include metrics like time on site or pages per visit.
Instead, focus on data that will help you identify where people are bouncing and why. This might include exit rates, events, and bounce rate by Device.
3. Use the Right Tools
Yes, you can harvest analytics data manually, but in most cases, this is a waste of time. Imagine if you had to log into each individual website and copy-paste the data into a spreadsheet. It would take forever!
Worst, there are so many mistakes that can happen along the way. You might accidentally leave out a website, copy the wrong data, or make an error in your calculations.
Instead, add analytics tools like Finteza to your analytics reporting process. Finteza offers a wide range of marketing resources to cater to different needs, such as customer attraction and retention metrics for e-commerce, website speed and performance, bot traffic analysis or tracking, and SEO performance analytics, among many more. Plus, they automate many of the tedious tasks for you, such as data entry and calculations.
With the right tool, you can dramatically cut down the time it takes to collect and interpret your data.
If you aim to just increase awareness about your website and brand, you can focus on collecting data on the average length of visit per user, bounce rate and click-through rates. On the other hand, if you wish to analyze your sales funnel, you can focus on interpreting your website’s conversion and retention rates. Finteza gives you that capability and more.
Remember that the more efficient your analytics tool is, the more you can focus on extracting insights from these data.
4. Collect Data Over Time
When you’re first starting out, it’s tempting to want to see results immediately. But, resist the urge to look at data too frequently.
If you’re constantly checking your analytics, you’ll only see short-term fluctuations that don’t really tell you anything useful.
Instead, collect data over time and look at it periodically. This could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly. By looking at data over a longer period of time, you get to see the bigger picture. You’ll be able to identify important trends like customer behavior, motivation, and preferences. Then, you can assess which of your current strategies are working in response to these trends and how you can make better decisions for your website accordingly.
Again, this depends on your business goals.
5. Segment Your Data
Not all website visitors are the same. Some are new visitors, while others are returning customers. Some come from organic searches, while others come from paid ads. And so on. To get a better understanding of your data, you need to segment it. This means breaking it down into smaller groups so you can see how different types of visitors interact with your website.
For example, you might segment your data by:
- Device type (desktop, mobile, tablet);
- Referral source (organic search, direct traffic, social media);
- Location (country, city);
- New vs. returning visitors.
By segmenting your data, you’ll be able to see which groups are performing well and which ones need improvement.
In the case of website visitors, segmenting your data can help you understand your customer’s behavior and current preferences. But, more importantly, it gives you a clearer view of your customer retention rate.
Customer retention simply means your ability to engage your existing customers and make them continue supporting your products or services. Analyzing your customer retention rate helps you establish a stable relationship with your customers. In addition, it allows you to tailor a more personalized customer experience that could lead to better engagements. The retention report can be used by almost all members of the project team, be they sales managers, UX researchers, or executive management.
6. Use Visualizations
Numbers can be hard to interpret, especially if you’re not a numbers person. But, everyone understands pictures. So instead of writing out long paragraphs of text, use visualizations to help tell your story.
There are many different types of visualizations you can use, such as:
- Charts and graphs;
- Tables;
- Maps;
- Infographics;
- Images and videos.
The key is to use the right visualization for the task at hand. For example, if you want to show a comparison, then a bar chart would work well. On the other hand, if you want to show a trend over time, then a line graph would be a better choice.
7. Focus on Insights, Not Data
At the end of the day, your analytics report is not an end in itself. It’s just a means to an end. The real goal is to use the data to improve your website and achieve your business goals.So instead of just dumping data into your report, take the time to analyze it and extract insights. What does the data tell you? What are some areas you need to improve? What are some things you’re doing well?
Answering these questions will help you make informed decisions that will move your business forward.
If you’re an e-commerce website with the main goal of maintaining your buyers, you can interpret your data accordingly. For example, are you seeing a significant difference between traffic and sales? Maybe you have to analyze how you can tailor your products based on your customer demographics, most searched items, or other relevant metrics. Perhaps you have to check the current product trends based on your customers and the season.
For niche websites that want to get more brand awareness, a great SEO performance, session length, or clickthrough rate will tell you that your visitors are satisfied and engaged with your website.
8. Automate Your Reporting
Once you have your analytics reporting process down, it’s time to automate it. This will save you a ton of time in the long run and help ensure that your reports are always accurate.
There are many different ways to automate your reports. You can use an analytics tool like Finteza, which will automatically collect data from all your websites and put it into easy-to-read reports.
Or, you can use a reporting tool like Google Data Studio, which lets you connect to different data sources and create custom reports.
Whatever method you choose, automating your report will help you save time and keep your data accurate.
Final Thoughts
Creating a detailed analytics report is equal parts art and science. Analytics tools help you collect the data, but it’s up to you to make sense of it and turn it into a useful report.
Setting the right foundation is critical to success. This means having a clear understanding of your goals, defining your audience, and choosing the right metrics. From there, it’s just a matter of putting in the work to collect and analyze the data. And don’t forget to use visuals to tell your story!
If you can master the art of analytics reporting, you’ll be well on your way to making better decisions for your website or those of your clients.
