 Today on The Journey, we're talking about website analytics that help your business grow. What are website analytics and why should you care? Frankly put, they're the numbers behind your website traffic and performance. Yeah, this data tells you a ton of stuff that you can use to really help your business grow. Like the devices that are on the top pages, all these different things. We're going to kind of break down those website analytics, some tools, and some things you should look at. So that's good stuff, right? A website that works means happier customers and more business for you. Yeah, and let's jump into a couple of the key terminology you'll need to know. Starting with page views. Page views is exactly what it sounds. How many times those pages have been viewed on your website and then there's bounce rate. You can think of bounce rate as say I go into a restaurant. I'm not really like what I'm seeing and I leave. Same thing with the website. If you see a pretty high bounce rate percentage, that means people are going to your website and they're bouncing. Another one is time on the site. Well, say they didn't bounce and they stayed there. It's just a measure of how long they were on your site. Next is sessions. It's determined by the time the visitor stayed on your site per visit. So let's talk about tools, right? We have to be able to look at these metrics. We can't just go to our website to find them. And I think the most popular one to date is Google Analytics. It's pretty easy to set up. They'll give you a little bit of tracking code like in WordPress or website builders is usually a place to add that in. So you don't even know how to use code. But it's going to give you all of this data like the session time, the overall page views, what devices they're on, what pages people are looking at, how long and a ton of other relevant information. Another one that you can look into hot jar. It is a free service and it actually gives you analytics, a heat map and a feedback feature. Yeah, I think that heat map feature is super important. So what that does, it's going to basically heat up your page wherever the mouse is most often. So if you notice on your site that people are hovering their mouse in a place that may not make sense or maybe you don't want them to be there yet, you can kind of adjust your page content to make sure the most relevant information is where their mouse is. And as Neely said, Google Analytics is very well known and it's a really robust tool. It gives you a lot of things to look at. Now, a big challenge for many business owners, you can have these tools and you can have a lot of data. But if you don't know what it means or what to look for, what's the point? You just get overwhelmed and you don't even look at the content itself. You want to break down some of our best tips of what to watch out for to get those basics down so you can become that many expert. Let's do it. Cool. Alright, so audience, it's important to know who's looking at your website. You need to know where they're coming from, where they're located, their age. Also, what are they looking at? How long are they on your website? Additionally, what are they using to look at your website? Mobile-friendly. You want to know all of these different aspects of your audience. Yeah, and if you notice that a lot of your visitors are coming on a certain Android phone, you want to make sure you test your site on that Android phone so you can make sure that it looks good where most of your audience is looking at. Another cool feature of the audience portion is interests. So you can actually see the general interests of your audience. Google collects a ton of data and lumps different people into different subjects. So you can see if the target market is actually looking at your content or if it's someone you may have never thought of, but really liked what you do. Next is acquisition. Where did they come from? Did they type you into Google search or did they click a link maybe in the blog post or they came from some social media post? It's important to know where your visitors are coming from. Yeah, and then the next place is going to be behavior. This really shows you the behavior of that visitor, which was the page that they actually landed on and then what was their flow throughout the website? Did they go to your homepage and then your contact then FAQ or they go maybe to your shop page, look at a product and then left altogether. The more you understand the flow of your visitor, the better you can really adjust the content accordingly to see where are they stopping, how can I entice them to continue and adjust from there. Next, conversions. Great way to learn about what people are doing the specific actions on your site. For instance, if they are clicking the sign up for your email newsletter or they're going to purchase a product or hey, click here to read more. Yeah, and what about those ones where you're about to leave the page and that pop up happens, those are the things that you want to convert. Now, these conversion metrics may not be set up automatically. It may take a couple of clicks or buttons for you to press and based off the tell Google, this is what a conversion means to my site. Whether they use the contact form or they purchase a product or they subscribe to your newsletter, whatever that is, you can set that up there. Then you can kind of see after X amount of people, how many people am I actually converting? And is that a number that works for me? Maybe I need to do something else to really improve on that. So why do we need to know about these website analytics? Well, knowing is better than guessing. It's important to know that your customers are enjoying the content that you're putting out there and you're actually making some kind of beneficial addition to them knowing that they'll continue to come back and be loyal. Yeah, it's like the old saying knowledge is power. But that's a wrap. We hope this helps you grow your business using website analytics. Make sure you like this video and add your other tips down below. Be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so you know when we have fresh content coming out. This is The Journey. See you next time.