Such analytics packages give you access to a wealth of information.
What pages have been viewed and not viewed,
how long surfers spend on each page, the most popular paths, sequence of pages,
that people usually follow to your site, where they come from, both physically and
the site on which they were before they came to your site, and much, much more.
Information such as this allows you to develop an in-depth understanding of
consumer behavior on your site and thus refine both your content and
features to more closely match their actual needs.
Analytics can also help you establish the effectiveness of your online marketing
techniques, helping you understand which actions are driving business to your
website, what their respective conversion rate is, and helping you to establish
what you should be doing more of and what you should be deemphasizing.
Let's have a look at an example of some Google Analytics screens
taken from a real hotel.
If we look at the overview screen, we can see some key metrics for
accessing the success or not of your website.
Notice in particular the number of users, which tells you how
much traffic you're getting, as well as the number of page views.
The ratio between these two numbers,
shown here in the middle, as well as the average session duration,
helps you understand whether this traffic is engaging with your site.
Also here you will find the bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors who come to
your website, but immediately leave without looking at any other content.
Obviously a high number here is bad,
as it means that visitors have not found what they're looking for.
And a high bounce rate also negatively affects you
in organic search engine optimization.
If we look at this next screen, we can see the geographical
origins of visitors to your site broken down here by country, but
you can have a different level of detail if you so wish.
Again, it shows the number of sessions,
the pages per session, the bounce rate, and the average session duration.
If you set up specific goals on Google Analytics, it also shows you the goal
compression rate, and even the monetary value earned, here on the right-hand side.