Web Analytics and User-Friendly Websites
Web Analytics tools, which analyze website traffic, are becoming much more frequently used and offer much greater analysis capabilities. They are now becoming real gold mines of information for referencers and people concerned with their website’s user-friendliness. These days, we are seeing much more concern for website user-friendliness than for other processes associated with e-marketing. As the Internet has already grown immensely, now seems to be a time for improving and optimizing the processes for searching information, online shopping, etc.
Thanks to Internet user tracking, it is possible to obtain data on website visitor behavior: the traditional number of visitors, page views, page entries/exits, the conversion rate (percentage of visitors who carried out a specified action), and the rebound rate (percentage of Internet users who leave a page immediately after entering). Such website visitor data can help analyzers identify problems with a website’s usability.
Let’s take the case of an online shopping website. In order to get a significant part of the market, it’s essential to have strong positioning in search engines. Even if that is enough to get consumers to a site, that alone will not keep them at a specific site. If navigating a website is difficult, users will leave the website quickly without purchasing anything, clearly a huge loss for the online shopping website. This is precisely why we are seeing the link between user-friendliness and Web Analytics in today’s e-business world. Google Analytics, the leader in Web Analytics tools, offers a large number of website visitor data, free of charge.
In most cases, a non user-friendly website will have a high rebound rate and a low conversion rate. But, these kinds of data do not stand on their own and must be taken alongside other information in order to be most relevant. It bears mentioning that Web Analytics does not put us next to Internet users or in their environments and leaves us in the dark about the specifics regarding the users´ navigation problems. There is no better way to learn about your website’s usability than carrying out user tests, interviews, and surveys. These help identify the problems that Internet users have. Of course, user tests take time and cost money. The low-cost Web analytics provides clues and can shed light on possible failures in the usability of your website.
Tags: usability, user-friendliness, Web Analytics, web performance
