Beginner's Guide to Web Analytics Report

Jul 07, 2020 ● 4 min read

Imagine a situation where you've been saddled with ensuring the delivery of accurate monthly analytics reports to your client or boss. One of the associated tasks is to ensure that these reports carry the right and accurate data. Apart from that, you'll also want to ensure that the reports will be accurate and understandable to the client. Everyone who comes across the reports should clearly understand the value the website is driving.

Of course, there is an opportunity to export a few PDFs of reports from Google Analytics tools and close the chapter. But, here is the challenge... How do you make these data useful to your client or boss? How does the data make sense to people who would spend much time assessing the graphs and statistics? How do you arrive at a web analytics report that your boss or clients will understand without hassles? How do you convince them to take their time to study the reports?

Introduction to Web Analytics

Having a website reach your desired level of performance isn't a child's play. It requires consistency in terms of monitoring as well as the measurement of visitor's data to optimize for web usage efficiently. This is where Web Analytics comes into play. Web analytics doesn't only help to measure traffic, but it also an effective tool to conduct business and market research.

Tracking website users' and visitors' behaviors allows you to gain insight into how they interact with your website. Apart from that, you'll also have a deeper understanding of how you can improve your website in terms of effective communication with your target audiences. In this piece, we'll take a closer look into what web analytics means and how to build a web analytics dashboard.

What is Web Analytics Dashboard?

A web analytics dashboard is simply a reporting interface that displays the data derived from the monitoring of your website performance. This is usually done by tracking some specific metrics or key performance indicators such as online conversions, bounce rates, page views, referral traffics, and so forth.

Web analytics tools or software are indispensable tools for every webmaster. This is because it allows smooth collection, collation, measurement, and analysis of data for their websites.

Usually, webmasters often install these tools on their website for the simple purpose of automating data collection. When it comes to data analytics tools, the most popular and renowned is Google Analytics. Why? It is because this software is free, easy-to-use, powerful, and customizable.

Interestingly, web analytics reports or dashboards can be used in a wide variety of contexts. Some of these include eCommerce, social media, UI/UX design, and SEO. Each of these contexts brings diverse perspectives to the performance of every website. For instance, when it comes to SEO, a webmaster will always want to ensure that the site generates a healthy inflow of search engine traffic. On the other hand, an eCommerce expert will also want to ensure that the website is increasing in terms of sales.

What are the Top Web Analytics Metrics?

• Source for Incoming Traffic: This simply refers to the source or origin of your website traffic. For instance, people can visit your site through search engines or email links.
• Page Views: Just as the names sound, page view simply means how your website visitors view your pages and the number of pages an average individual visit before leaving your site. This metric takes into account the pattern of page views of a single user.
• Average time on page: This refers to an average time a website users spend on a single page. The longer a visitor stays on your website is an excellent indication that your website is filled with engaging and high-quality content.
• Bounce Rate: This simply refers to the percentage of a single page visitor. It mostly analyzes the number of people who visit a page on your website and left immediately without interacting further.
• Exit Percentage: This refers to the last page visited by a particular website visitor. Of course, a visitor might view hundreds of pages, but this metric measures the last website he/she visits before leaving your site.
• Locations: Where are your visitors coming from? This metric helps to measure the specific location of your web visitors.
• Devise usage: No matter how your website is built, it should be responsive and friendly to all devices. This measures the percentage of users visiting your website from different sources in terms of devices.

Other metrics include conversion rates, referral traffics, behavior flow, landing page performance, site's speed, and many more. Below you can see an example of Whatagraph analytical Facebook data report:



Why Build a Web Analytics Dashboard or Report?

A web analytics dashboard's significance is to allow the smooth and hassle-free monitoring of your website in terms of its performance. While there are lots of proficient and expert marketers and webmasters when it comes to using Google Analytics, other members of your team might be unfamiliar with that great tool.

A web analytics dashboard is a reporting tool that provides a mechanism that shares website insight in a clear, concise, and simple way. If you are contemplating on whether to build a website analytics dashboard or not, here are few reasons why you might need a web analytics dashboard;

• You work with an organization where visibility and insight into website performance is a primary objective.
• You oversee the performance of a website that hosts a large pool of monthly visitors.
• You are saddled with the responsibility of combining data from web analytics with other sales and marketing data to understand your website's performance better
• You are challenged to simplify the monitoring of critical metrics without exploring or utilizing common tools like Google Analytics.

How to Create a Web Analytics Visual Report

Building a web analytics report implies that you'll generate data from your website into a visual data tool like Whatagraph. Furthermore, these data will be utilized in creating graphical representations.

When it comes to creating web analytics data visualization, here are the simple checklists:

• Identify the web analytics metric and key performance indicators you need to monitor.
• Identify the current source of the data such as Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and more.
• Determine your preferred choice of view of your dashboard such as mobile or TV dashboard.
• Determine and assess the dashboard software vendor.
• Pull data from your data sources into the dashboard.
• Build and design graphical representation and visualization for your web analytics dashboard.
• Finally, share the web analytics dashboard with your team. This encourages adoption.

Written by Gintaras Baltusevicius

Gintaras is a marketing enthusiast who is always eager to explore the most up-to-date issues in data marketing. He is always in search for new and unexplored angles to share with his readers.