“Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.” – Plato

There are a vast array of analytics you can add to your website to track this information. Before you start investing in this data, it's best to do your research. Make sure you know what information you are going to receive and see if you can get a free trial. Another important fact to consider is what you’re going to do with this data when you receive it. If you don’t have the internal resource to action the results are you going to invest in external support? Having lots of data sounds great but it's worth being realistic with what you are going to do with it.

We would always recommend that you start with Google analytics. It’s free and you just add some code to your site. It’s a robust platform with around 30 million websites actively using it. It will tell you basic information on how many users are on your site, what areas they are visiting from, what devices they are using, the channels that drive the most traffic and so on. The information is quite basic but you can try this out as a first step. If you don’t have a web developer to help you with this, there are some great YouTube videos on how to undertake this.

Note, as soon as you start tracking your site visitors you will need to consider the GDPR implications and apply cookies to your site. This is simple to do, just ensure you are meeting your business obligations.

For a more advanced set of analytics, the solution will depend on your available resource in time and cost. There are many solutions on the market to consider. First Guide have a created a top 10 guide to Web Analytics Software to Track Your Business Performance – The Best Web Analytics Tools 2022. Leadfeeder have also pulled together a list of 25 Best Website Analytic Tools for 2022. These reviews will help guide you on the best solution to suit your needs.

Finding the insight from this data is key. What is the data telling you about your audience and their behaviours? Are they visiting certain pages and ignoring others? What patterns are forming? Make a few changes, monitor the data for any changes in behaviour and repeat. Manage this process in chunks and it will give you clarity on where you made effective change. 

The solution may only require a small adjustments, so keep it simple. Here a couple of areas to look at first:
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Clarity – Do you have lots of information, images and text on your site? Is the message clear?
Solution – Less is more. Summarise your text, reduce the amount of moving elements, simplify your layout.

Navigation – Can users easily find their way around your site or have you created to many layers or dead ends?
Solution – Have one simple navigation, and ensure users can always find their way back to landing pages. A good rule is to ensure they're only three clicks from what they need.

Calls-to-action (CTA) - Do you have them and are they in the right place?
Solution - move the CTAs to more prominent locations, that make sense in the story you’re telling.

If you’re struggling to know how to read your analytics data and make effective changes to your existing site, please drop us a line. We can help you with the insight and provide you with a road map for implementation in a fraction of the time that it may take you.