Website analytics is the beauty of measuring your website performance. It’s fascinating how a few lines of code can tell you where each site visitor came from, the devices they used, and the actions they took on your site.
Web analytics can, however, be limited, especially if you’re not using the right tool.
There’s so much insight that you or your team may not get if you are using Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or similar web analytics tools.
To help in this regard, we have put together 6 questions you can answer to determine if your current web analytics tool is efficient.
1. Can You track individual Customers?
Web analytics tools should go beyond web page metrics to providing you with insight into your visitors. You should be able to see their IP addresses, detect behavioral patterns and track every action they take on your site.
This information is necessary to personalize your customer experience and make more bespoke recommendations. It will also improve your interaction with your visitors and enhance segmentation. Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t have user tracking capability. So you can’t get the valuable data you need using it. Your web analytics tool should allow you to track unique user ID, so you can understand your customers and better connect with them.
2. Does it Recognize Return Users?
Proper attribution is essential for multi-channel marketing and that’s one area where Google Analytics sucks. While it’s great for tracking single-section users; it’s mediocre when it comes to multi-session visits. The reason for this is because Google analytics relies on each user’s cookies to track them.
So if a user frequently deletes their cookies, then Google analytics will categorize the return customer as new. Return users will continue to appear as new as long as they delete their cookies (which most users today do).
A top web analytics tool like FoxMetrics on the other hand will allow you to correctly identify return users without cookies. It assigns unique IDs to each user so you can collect data about them every session.
3. Can You track the Full Customer Journey?
Customer journeys are becoming more complex and longer. Today, it can take as many as 500 touchpoints to convert a prospect seeking to buy a concert ticket. So you need to be able to track the potentially hundreds of touchpoints with your web analytics tool.
Unfortunately, this isn’t possible if you are using Google analytics. GA tracks sessions, not visitors, so it’s impossible to build on the customer journey.
4. Can it identify Why things are not working?
Web analytic tools shouldn’t just show that things aren’t working. A good web analytics tool should go further to provide insight on why “things” aren’t working. For instance, if there’s a drop in the number of conversions you had over a week, the web analytic tool should tell you why there was a drop.
Let’s say you drive 50 new leads via PPC at $150 to your landing page, Google analytics will show that you have 50 new leads. However, you may only be able to convert 7 of them. Compare this to another campaign where you drive another 50 new leads at the same cost and can convert 28 of them.
If you are assessing both campaigns with Google analytics, it would show you 50 new leads each. But in reality, the results were different – Google analytics just can’t see beyond that.
This is just another example of how GA and similar limited tools restrict businesses from using them. A proper tool like FoxMetrics will provide deeper insights into lead quality.
5. Can You Track The Performance Of Your Personalization Efforts?
Personalizing your services, offers and interactions can go a long way in helping you better connect with your customers. However, personalization requires a huge effort on your side. So it’s important to be able to track the performance of these efforts to know if they’re working or whether you need to re-strategize.
For instance, you may want to know the percentage of customers that made purchases using your personalized recommendations, personalized emails, or remarketing campaigns. If you are using Google Analytics or similar tools, this may not be possible. GA would only show you what’s happening based on the information you inputted.
It however doesn’t require much effort to look up this information and make transformative changes when using a top tool like FoxMetrics.
What You Should Do
If your answers to most of the questions are “NO”, then there’s only one solution. You need a better web analytics tool. There are many out there, but you can trust FoxMetrics to deliver all the features you need to track every aspect of your website and customer journey.
Sign up on FoxMetrics today!