Not many people know this, but having a WordPress analytics tool gives you a competitive advantage. It’s also essential to the growth of your website. For many businesses, websites are the main driver of revenue and sales. In the case of blogs, it’s your first chance to make a lasting impression.
Now, maybe you’ve heard of Google Analytics or even the privacy-friendly alternative, Matomo Analytics, but have never tried them? These are analytics platforms that help you understand your website traffic and visitors. (You can find these platforms as plugins in the WordPress directory!)
They’re important because the insights you get help you determine what changes to make to improve your website. Without them you could face a tougher time figuring out what’s working, what the issues are (and solving them before they get out of hand), and making sure you’re taking your website in the right direction.
WordPress analytics gives you an understanding of what’s actually going on.
How does a WordPress analytics plugin benefit your website?
What this means for you is getting a toolkit to learn how to get more sales or followers and subscribers (aka conversions in analytics terms).
By getting insights into user behaviour, content performance, and how you can optimise your website, you can reach more of your goals, like increasing sales or growing your audience.
A WordPress analytics tool helps you get more traffic to your site
You get a range of features which tell you which acquisition channels are working for you like – social media, search engines, and other websites mentioning you. This helps you make an informed decision on where to focus energies (or spend) to get more of the ideal people coming through to your website.
Example: Looking through your acquisition channels and seeing that Reddit drives a lot of traffic through to your website. Since this channel seems to be working for you, you could then spend more time on Reddit posts to increase traffic.
But getting more traffic isn’t all there is to it. Once they land on your site, you want them to stay for a little longer so they are intrigued by what you’re offering. Be it a product, or awesome content.
Which leads us to …
Increasing engagement by learning about visitor behaviour
When you get a solid number of visitors on your website, it’s good to then learn about how they behave on your site. A WordPress analytics tool helps with engagement since you’re seeing what’s appealing to them, and what isn’t.
Increasing engagement is good for a few reasons.
- You end up speaking the language of your readers.
- You can make a difference with the information you’re putting out.
- You get loyal customers and believers in your organisation.
With more engaged visitors, you can build trust with them and eventually be able to convince them that your product, service, or blog is needed in their lives.
Example: Looking through entry and exit pages to see what first impression is making them stay, and what impression is making them leave. This helps you redirect efforts to give your website a better chance of getting visitors to stay longer.
Improving your content and engagement can lead to more conversions
After you get visitors engaged, it’s time to convert.
Whether you have an ecommerce site or freelance blog, you’ll need to know how to boost conversions. This simply means getting people to achieve more of the actions you’re wanting them to take on your site. Like subscribing to your newsletter or adding items to a cart.
With conversion optimization features, you’re finding out how well your website is designed to get buyers through a journey to conversion.
Example: Say you’ve created a newsletter sign up page, but you’re not getting as many sign ups as you’d like. With a web analytics tool, you can look into it further. A funnels feature could tell you how they’re getting to that page. If people can’t find your page, that could be reason for low conversion rates. Or, maybe you are getting people landing on this page, but you can’t tell why they’re not signing up. Try setting up a heatmap to see how far they’re scrolling down your page to the sign up section. Through these conversion optimization features, you can make tweaks that significantly improve conversions.
So, how does the Matomo Analytics for WordPress plugin help with all of this?
Matomo Analytics for WordPress is a free web analytics plugin that gives you access to all the features mentioned above, right in your own WordPress dashboard. It’s completely free to use and is handy for users of all skill levels. From beginners right through to advanced analysts.
You get to move through all the stages to increase traffic, increase engagement, and convert. By using Matomo for WordPress, you put yourself in a better position to track all the needed data from your WordPress website.
You have this toolkit to improve your website for free, with a few clicks!
By getting useful insights like visitors, acquisitions, bounce rates etc. you gain a new perspective on how to improve your website so it’s better at doing what you created it to do. Getting these insights also means giving yourself the confidence to do what’s best for your website in a data-driven way.
With all this knowledge, you can be competitive, or grow enough that you’re leaving your competitors in the dust.
