Many small businesses and startups nowadays use their websites as a powerful marketing tool to acquire new customers and drive sales. But each enterprise has to explore ways to divert more visitors to the website and persuade visitors to spend more time. Also, it needs to collect, measure, and analyze the website data regularly to improve customer experience and meet marketing goals. Often small business owners lack the skill and resources required to collect and analyze website data regularly.

Web analytics help small businesses and start-up to collect, report, measure, and analyze website data by overcoming constraints related to skill and resources. A small business can use web analytics services to gather important website traffic information like visits, page views, top page and top sources. At the same time, web analytics accelerates decision making process by complementing the data with relevant and meaningful insight. Each enterprise can even use the insightful data collected through web analytics to understand behaviour, preferences, and interests of website visitors, along with exploring new target markets and analyzing emerging market trends.

7 Reasons Why Small Businesses Must Leverage Benefits of Web Analytics

1) Make the website deliver personalize user experience

Nowadays consumers love websites that deliver personalized user experience. A small business needs a variety of real-time information to improve and personalize its website’s user experience. Web analytics help entrepreneurs to helps entrepreneurs to determine geographic location of visitors based on their IP addresses. An entrepreneur can even take advantage of the insightful data to personalize user experience.

2) Know website visitors’ interests and behaviour

In addition to identifying the geographic location of visitors, web analytics also provide insightful information like unique users, unique sessions, performance of different traffic sources, and top performing website content. An enterprise can also use a robust web analytics solution to collect user-specific information. The insightful data help small business owners to identify what customers like and are looking for. He can even use the data to increase conversion rate by customizing sales pitch and updating website content.

3) Know why visitors are abandoning the website

The visitors may abandon a website to a number of reasons. The small businesses must know why website is losing visitors to improve user engagement and experience. Web analytics help small businesses to determine why visitors leave the website by visiting a single page through bounce. It further allows entrepreneurs to break down and analyze bounce. Hence, it becomes easier for the website owner to see the web pages visited by visitors and amount of time spent on individual web page. He can even use bounce as a robust tools to prevent visitor abandonment by measuring and improving the website user journey.

4) Track Sources of Website Traffic

A website gets visitors from various sources including search engines, social media, emails and display ads. But the small business must identify and analyze various sources of website traffic to make their digital marketing campaigns successful. The insightful customer and market data provided by web analytics make it easier for small enterprises to fine-tune their digital marketing campaigns by targeting more relevant customers. For instance, an entrepreneur can easily boost his search engine and social media campaigns by using web analytics to choose the right keywords based on various websites, blogs, online discussion forums, and social media posts. Likewise, a small business also has option to use social media analytics tools if its website is getting a large percentage of visitors through social networks.

5) Analyze Target Audience and Market

The websites enable small businesses to sell their product to customers residing in various regions. But the interests, preference, and behaviour of customers differ according to their geographic location. Likewise, the demand for the same product may vary from one region to another. Hence, small enterprises must promote the products by targeting the most relevant audience and market to increase sales revenue. Web analytics makes it easier for small businesses to understand the target audience precisely based on user-specific information like age, gender, geographic location and behaviour.

6) Optimize Digital Marketing Campaigns

Several web analytics solutions provide features to measure the performance of various digital marketing campaigns. Some solutions even help enterprises to identify the marketing campaigns which drive more visitors to the website. The insightful data helps small businesses to invest their limited resources in the right marketing campaigns and challenges. A small business can further get higher ROI by linking resource allocation to predefined marketing objectives. Web analytics further helps small enterprises to curtail digital marketing expenses by understanding the effectiveness of individual marketing campaigns. The insightful information provided by web analytics further helps small businesses to run ads and marketing campaign by targeting relevant audience.

7) Improve the website’s UI and UX

The small businesses can use web analytics to collect, measure, report, and analyze website data. But the insightful data provided by web analytics also helps the entrepreneur to improve his website’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). The understanding of behaviour and interests of the target audience will help the entrepreneur to keep visitors engaged by making relevant changes to the website. For instance, an entrepreneur can keep website visitors engaged by improving navigation, selecting the right font-style, or customizing UI design elements. These changes will further help the business owner to keep his website popular over a period of time.

The small businesses have option to choose from a wide range of web analytics tools and services – Google Analytics, Open Web Analytics, Clicky, Heap, Piwik and W3Counter. They can even choose from the free and premium editions of the same web analytics solutions. However, it is always important for a small business to compare the features provided by individual solutions according to its marketing strategy and objectives to leverage benefits of web analytics over a longer period of time.