Web Analytics to Track Customer Behavior – Why Is It Important?

Do you have analytics installed on your website? If they are installed, do you look at the data regularly? Analytics can help you learn valuable information about your customers’ behavior. It can tell you how to provide more value and optimize every customer’s experience.

What Analytics Can Tell You

There are varying degrees of analytics. At the most basic level a simple analytics program can tell you:

• How long a customer has been on your website
• How many pages they viewed per visit
• How they arrived at your website
• How long they stayed on your website
• What keywords brought them to your website
• How they were referred to your website. For example, social networking link

Advanced analytics can show you:

• Geographical information – where your visitors come from
• What page they land on when they arrive at your website
• What page they last visit on your website before they click away
• Shopping cart abandons
• External clicks
• Path taken on your website. What pages they visited along the way

All of this information can help you create a better customer experience and a better business.

For example, if you study how your visitor arrived at your website, you may notice that a majority of your traffic comes from organic search. You can then modify your traffic generation strategy to support more incoming traffic. If you find that a particular blog owner has been linking to your site, you can seek a potential partnership with them.

Or if you find that many of your visitors come from a specific region of your country or the world, you can then conduct research to find content keywords and even products or services to cater to this market.

Of all the analytic information that may be the most beneficial, take a look at the path your customer takes on your website. This is helpful if you have a strategy to lead them from point A to point B. For example, to lead them from a landing page to a third tier affiliate link. If the path isn’t working, you can make adjustments. You can test and track to find the best tactics to achieve your goals.

Studying customer behavior on your website isn’t a simple and straightforward task. Analytics can help. When you install analytics on your site, use them. Create a system to review the data regularly. Plan and make decisions based on the data you’ve collected. Analytics and customer behavior data can change your business.