Why use an analytics tool?

What Are The Benefits of Analytics?

Analytics tools collect and comprehend data and statistics from your website usage to help you make informed decisions and optimise your presence for optimal performance. Broadly speaking web analytics work by tracking website visitors as they use your site to understand what they view and do. By tracking this data, analytics tools can generate reports that can help you make informed decisions on how to improve the effectiveness of your website, whether that be more leads or more conversions or better business performance.

Analytics Lead to Informed Decision Making

There are two famous sayings in business when it comes to tracking “you need to measure what matters”, and “what gets measured gets managed”. Within the context of analytics, this means that if you want to get lots of visitors to your website i.e. “what matters”, then you should first start from a basis of measuring how many people are visiting your site currently, so you can manage and implement steps to improve this figure. As you gradually make changes and improvements you can measure their effectiveness at increasing the number of visitors to your site. If you then apply this same logic to all of the metrics you care about for your business, over time you should see lots of small improvements that will ultimately lead to big improvements in your results.

More Efficient Usage of Time

Time is a valuable commodity so you need to make sure you’re not wasting it on things that don’t matter. You may really enjoy spending hours working on a certain section of your website but if your analytics reveal that nobody visits that section, then it probably shouldn’t be taking up the majority of your time. On the flip side, if you notice that another section of your website over-delivers towards your goals, you might want to expand it where possible or create marketing campaigns driving more people to it.

Make Better Data-Driven Decisions

When do you consider making changes to your website? Is it because a customer made a complaint? Or when the CEO has a new idea? Either way, these are just two people in the equation and neither necessarily knows what is best for the majority of your users. Analytics can help you to quantify which parts of your site are most successful at achieving your business objectives. This means that the next time a customer or your CEO suggests a change, you can first look at how popular your current configuration is, and if it looks like it still may be worth changing something, then you can make the changes, note them down and track exactly how successful they are through structured experiments.

Without analytics on your site, you can only learn through what people specifically tell you and if you’re selling something, your sales numbers are the only real indicator of how you are doing. However, there are a lot of things that can impact your customer journey that people may not necessarily tell you about, and that could be preventing people from reaching the sales stage. Page Analytics and event tracking can help to fill in the picture of what is happening before a sale is made, as well as the potential scale of any problems or opportunities.

Discover Missed Opportunities

Analytics isn’t always about tracking what is on your site. It can also be about understanding what isn’t on your site. For example the Site Search tracking feature offered by Matomo keeps a log of everything that people search for on your site. If there are things that many people are searching for, but it is something that you don’t actually offer, then it could present an opportunity to expand your offering. Without analytics you would have no idea that all these people were searching your site and leaving disappointed. With analytics you have the opportunity to expand your offering and income.

Get Early Warnings of Changes Before It’s Too Late

Just because something worked once, doesn’t mean that it will continue to work forever. Have you ever noticed how even the best advertising campaigns tend to disappear or at least change over time? This is because the impact of specific marketing messages can decrease over time. Or there may be other changes that mean something you do doesn’t resonate any more. Without analytics, the first warning sign you will have is when your sales stop coming in, but by that point it may already be too late to adjust course.

Your website analytics data, with features like custom reports and custom alerts, can bring to your attention subtle shifts in your business and market that could ultimately lead to much bigger changes. Are less people visiting a certain page? Is your best performing page starting to get less conversions? Well, there could be a problem. Armed with this information you can form hypotheses about why these changes are happening and then you can implement changes or experiments (A/B Tests) designed to improve the situation. Here, again, your analytics will come to your assistance by providing ongoing feedback as to the effectiveness of any changes that you implement.

Learn What Off-Site Activity Attracts People to Your Website

There is a classic phrase in advertising. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. This is a throwback to the times of offline advertising when you really couldn’t track every person in the street that might have seen a billboard. Luckily with analytics on your website, you should be able to know almost exactly where every visitor to your website has come from and what they have seen. Whether it is through channel reports or campaign tracking, there are features that will help you learn which online advertising campaigns are worth re-investing in and which are simply eating into your budget with little to no return.

Make More Money Through Increased Sales, Clicks and Visits

Most people in business would probably agree that increased visits, interactions and sales is a good thing. With that said, whatever your Goals are, you can track them within your analytics to understand how well you are doing and also to monitor the impact of any changes you make to ensure that they are always working to improve your performance against key business objectives.

Improve Customer Experience and Support

Analytics can be a powerful tool to enable better customer support if your product is primarily online. For example, if you run a paid membership site or sell digital downloads. When a user comes to you requesting support, they often won’t understand why they are encountering an issue. With the right analytics configuration and features like Matomo’s User ID enabled, you can drill down to the individual user level to understand how visitors are using your site and what potential issues they are stumbling into. This allows you to offer a far more detailed and empathetic response to their situation as you know exactly why they’ve been getting stuck (and can hopefully provide them with a solution!)

How Analytics Work

Now that you know why you want to use analytics, it might be interesting to get a quick foundational view of how it works. We won’t get too deep into the tech specifics here, but it all begins with tracking code on your website. The most common way to configure this code for Matomo is with a JavaScript tracking snippet that you include on all of the pages of your site. Now, whenever a page is loaded, it will also load a custom Matomo tracking script that collects data about what people view and do on your site. It then processes all of this data on the backend and sends it to several reports that you can learn from by visiting the relevant Matomo report.

We have alluded to some of the things that are tracked in the above. However, the things tracked by analytics tools like Matomo broadly fit into four main categories:

  • Visit Information – This tracks which pages and assets are visited and interacted with in some way e.g. Event Tracking and Content Tracking
  • Visitor Information – This tracks details about people accessing your content. For example, what browser they are using, where they come from, what language they use etc
  • Marketing Performance Data – This can cover things such as how many people have come from a specific campaign, but it also covers a lot of calculated metrics from your raw data to provide things like conversion rates for your website.
  • Technical Performance Data – This covers things like how fast your pages load, your SEO web vitals and whether there are errors within your web application.

Why use Matomo for analytics?

Matomo isn’t the only analytics solution out there, but it has a lot of features that put it ahead in the market.

  • Privacy Focused – It provides advanced options to improve both the privacy of your users and also of your business. Learn more about Matomo’s privacy.

  • Secure – Matomo has been audited by at least three top security researchers and all new code is reviewed by at least two core developers. Additionally there is an active bug bounty and continuous testing in every build to ensure that your analytics data remains secure. You can learn more about Matomo’s security processes here.

  • Owned Data – All of the data you collect is yours. You aren’t obligated to share it with third parties for benchmarks and advertising features as in some other analytics platforms. Learn more about Data Ownership with Matomo.

  • No limitations – You can access and process the data in any way that you see fit whether you have one website or one hundred.

  • Open Source and Customisable – You can be safe in the knowledge that the code is fully open and available for auditing to ensure security. Additionally, the open source nature means that you can extend and customise the feature set to your specific requirements, either by creating a plugin or even by submitting improvements to the project on Github. Learn more about Matomo’s free licencing.

  • On-Premise – With Matomo, you have the ability to download the software and host it on your own servers for increased control, security and privacy. This is especially useful if you work in highly regulated environments like finance and government. Learn more about Matomo On-Premise.

  • Open APIs – Matomo is built with extensible APIs so you can create, read and update and delete data through external applications. This is a useful feature for power users that can allow you to automate tasks and integrate with in-house or third party tools. Learn more about Matomo’s API.