Web analytics tips for entrepreneurs: metrics, KPIs and the best 4 tools to analyze the results of your strategy

Web analytics includes the measurement, analysis and reporting of the activity of users on the online setting of an organization (in which controlling directly) with the objective of optimizing web sites, mobile applications, etc. 

Digital Analytics is based on three tests: 

Analysis of users behaviour accessing a website or mobile from any type of device application, 

-Analysis of tuser experience when browsing that website (what he or she has felt) 

-Analysis of competition (competitive intelligence). 

Strategic business objectives must have answer to questions such as: what are you waiting to get your for business being p resent on the Internet? What is the top priority of your website? 

Oddly enough still there is a large percentage of companies that are not clear why they are online, that they have created their website  because “nowadays every company has one” and have not established any clear strategic goals.

-Increase the company´s sales

• Get a steady flow of leads or potential clients to the company 

• Establish yourself as an expert in your market 

The strategic objectives are very important to know what we want to achieve, but are not enough by themselves, we need to achieve much more. The specific objectives are usually tasks which we must carry out to ensure the compliance of strategic objectives, for example: 

If our strategic goal is to increase “the company,´s sales” the specific objectives would be: bring more traffic to the website,increase conversions or improve the web usability. 

Do not forget that nowadays almost all web analytics tools allow you to establish your goals, so that you can track smoothly, so once you have them clear, you start to measure them. 

A metric is nothing more than a number. It can be a total, it may be a ratio (a division between two numbers). Examples of total metrics: Total visits, page views, unique users, etc... While ratios are: conversion rate to sale, ratio of filled-out forms,etc... 

KPIs are indicators that may be metric, but not any metrics, but metrics that allow you to know if you are achieving your strategic goals and specific objectives. KPI is the abbreviation of Key Performance Indicator, in other words, key performance indicators. 

For example, a strategic objective can be: increase sales and one of its associated KPIs can be: average size of the shoppingcart (measured in €). 

Therefore, if you do not have clear objectives it will be impossible to establish the appropriate KPIs. Maybe you are measuring hundreds of metrics but without goals or KPIs is like not having anything. 

1. Sessions: Number of times that users have visited our website in ag iven period of time. When an user accesses our site, a new sesssion starts, which will remain open and will bring together all the user´s clicks to be able to count them as a single visit. 

The sesión is considered as finished when the user leaves our site, or if the user does not perform any action (click) on our site during a certain time (30 minutes by default in Google Analytics). If the same user accesses again, a new session will be started and it will be counted as a new visit. 

2. Users: It represents the number of people who have visited our site in a given period of time. If the same user makes more than one visit in that period of time, is counted as one unique visit. 

In order to determine if an user accesses our site multiple times,persistent cookies are used in the browser. These cookies are small pieces of information that browsers allow a site to store,and are forwarded automatically by the browser whenever the user visits the site. This system is the same one that is normally used to control the sessions mentioned above, and is not a system which can ensure 100% control of users and their visits.An user can use different browsers to access our site, you can delete the cookies from your browser, it may have disabled cookies... but normally cookies will allow to track the user correctly (at 98% cases aprox.). 

3. Page views: Number of pages that have been visited by users for a period of time. 

4. Time spent on site: Average time that a visitor stays on our website. 

5. Time spent on one page: It is the time spent since a user accesses a page, until he or she browses to another page of our site. In the calculations of the time spent on a page, it is important to highlight the complexity that arises when calculating this time on the last page that a user visits (exit pages of the site). When a user is viewing what will be its last page (and makes no more clicks on our site), the analytical tools tend not to be able to calculate the real time that the user stays on the page and therefore is not accounted. 

6. Bounces and bounce rate: Bounces are the visits to one page generated by users who do not click on any link to continue browsing our website. This metric is particularly important, because we can come to conclusions from his analysis. The visits that only generate a view page indicate (in most cases), that despite having caught a user´s attention, we have failed to retain it in anyway, nor make this visit a defined objective. 

This metric must be analyzed it totaled for all our site, and individually for each one of our pages, so that we can determine which are the pages with the highest bounce rate. For pages that are generating the highest bounce rate, the next thing we could study are the sources of traffic from them. Where do these visits come from that do not find our website interesting? Visits may come from sites that we referenced, results of searches, ads sponsored... in any case, if we study where they come from we can understand why there are bounces,. Also what users are looking for when they land on our pages, so that we can improve in different ways. Blogs are an example of exception, since most of the visits are generated by users who have come only to read the last published post,or stay in the homepage by reviewing the latest ones. 

7. New visitors and return visitors: these two indicators allow us to determine the percentage of visits that are made by users who have previously accessed our site, and which are of user sessions accessing for the first time. It is a good indicator to measure the audience that we have managed to retain on our site. 

8. Percentage of dropouts: this indicator allows us to know the percentage of users who leave our site from a particular page. We must study this indicator, in cases we have defined a particular funnel conversion in which we put users up to our goal. 

For example, in an e-commerce site, the process of adding products to the cart and browse through the different necessary steps to complete the purchase (registration to the user, your shipping address, your payment details...). 

Within this sequence of pages which the user must pass through, it is especially useful to analyze the percentage of drop-outs to make improvements that help to reduce them. 

In terms of free web analytical tools we can highlight GoogleAnalytics, Piwik, Open Web Analytics and Clicky.
 

The choice of the analytical tool must be based on your company needs and your resources (it will vary very much if you have to take care of this task by yourself or you can hire someone to do that). Anyway, free tools offer complete services, and in many cases you will not need more advanced services. 

It is a free web site statistics service that offers information about how visitors use our website, how they have come to it, and what we can do to keep them visiting it. It also allows to measure sales and conversions. 

Google Analytics allows you, among other things to: 

-Generate powerful and easy to use reports so that we can decide what data we wish to see and customize our reports. 

-Analysis of social networks: it allows us to know the way in which the visitors to our website are involved with our content on social platforms. 

-Content Analytics: it shows us which parts of our website have a good performance and which pages are most popular, so that we can create a better experience. 

-Advertising Analytics: it offers information about the performance of our ads on social networks, mobile phones and the searching network. It also links the activity of our website with our marketing campaigns offering a complete perspective, improving the performance of our advertising. 

-Analysis of conversions: it lets us know how many clients we attract, how much we sell and how they are involved with our site. 

-Mobile Analytics: it helps us to measure the impact of mobile devices. In addition, if we create an application for mobile phones, Google Analytics offers for iOS and Android software development kits so that we can evaluate how users use our application. 

Clicky is one of the most complete tools on the market today, along with Google Analytics. It offers all data in real time, so you do not have to wait to generate reports. In addition, it shows each visitor individually and the actions that performs on your website, so it is a way to know what your visitors most look for on your website. 

However, its interface is not too intuitive so you may need extra help to learn how to use it. 

Open Web Analytics stands out because it includes the features of various products, it has all the features of Google Analytics,adding heat (heatmaps) maps and click-streams of ClickTale,it is an excellent choice to make it an in-house web analysis tool in-investing some money in hardware, data are kept under the client´s domain, so it is an alternative to be considered by customers who cannot send information for protocols or data protection issues to third-party companies. It also allows us to create new panels and generate new metrics that are calculated based on the data that the tool keeps. Its installation is quite simple, just upload files by FTP and follow the instructions of the installer. 

It is an open source  web analytics tool written in PHP Language with a MySQL database, which offers both a manual installation on a server as a PRO model with data in the cloud. 

Its main feature is that you have control of the data. You can access them easily from the tool APIs . Besides having standard reports, it has another advantage in terms of privacy:the behavior of visitors to your website will be not shared with other companies or with advertisers. It also has Ecommerce Analytics, visitors in real time and specific and identifying tabs of the visitors and their behavior on your website. 

In the part of competitive intelligence, it is important to highlight the tool Similar Web (http://www.similarweb.com/) that offers data of our competition.