What is it?

Data analytics is the process of using data sets and identifying trends within them to discover insights and test hypotheses. In regard to web traffic, web analytics tracks a variety of metrics of how people interact with a live webpage, such as time spent on each page, number of visits, bounce rate, user journeys and more. It can be used to track a change in metrics over time as well.

Purpose of data analytics

Data analytics is a great starting point in defining a user need to focus on. Data analytics is also a useful tool to gather quantitative data and understand how users are using your product. However, data analytics are usually not enough to fully understand why users are interacting with your product. For instance, web analytics can show you that you have a high bounce rate on a webpage, but it is limited by the data that are collected to explain why that is. To fully understand why users behave the way they do, data analytics must be paired with other user research techniques like usability tests to further understand the problem.

Useful metrics

There are many different metrics and types of information that web analytics services collect. Here are a few that may be useful:

  • Acquisition: How people reach your website or page, like through organic search, referrals, advertisements or other methods. How content is prioritized and structured on the page will dictate how people will be able to find you through organic search.
  • Conversions: How many users will complete the goals that are set on the website. The higher conversion rate means that the higher people were able to accomplish the goals that were set for them. A/B tests are widely used to compare conversion rates between different variation of designs.
  • Time on page: The amount of time a user is active on a page on the website—from the moment they enter the page until the user exits the page.
  • New sessions: The number of first-time visits (new users) during a specific time period. New sessions help us understand whether there is a lot of new traffic or returning users on the website. If there are no returning users, it may be mean that there is an issue with the webpage that users are deciding not to return.
  • Pageviews: The number of views a specific page of the website has over a certain period of time.
  • Bounce rate: The percentage of users who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. High bounce rates are not ideal for pages that are meant to lead to other pages.
  • Exit %: The percent of users that exiting the website while they are going through a series of pages to get to a goal (final page). If a user is exiting at the end of a goal, then a high percentage is good. If there is a high percent of users exiting a webpage in the process of reaching the ideal goal, there may be an issue with that specific page that is preventing users from progressing forward.

Setting up data analytics

There are many online tools and software that can help you track your website and collect data such as Google Analytics. For any questions on data analytics, you may contact digital.standard@ontario.ca.

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