Web analytics tools help you track visitors, monitor their behavior and find out whether your current marketing campaign or search engine optimization strategy is working and increasing traffic.

Web analytics tools will gather statistics from your website including how many visitors per day, where they are located and how they found you. Demographic information is incredibly useful especially in regards to advertising. If you’re a small business for example a shop or restaurant., targeting locally may be your agenda, whilst downloadable products such as ebooks, music and video could be targeted to a global audience.

Some analytics tools are able to tell you which search queries a user found your website from. This is valuable information for increasing and enhancing your search engine optimization. By discovering which keywords are popular you can adjust your search marketing strategy and better your chances of driving further traffic to your website.

Web analytics tools can monitor hits (how many people visited your website) and unique visitors. Some programs will tell you returning visitors and ‘bounce’ rates. Bouncing is how long a person stayed on your website, did they find what they were looking for or move on to the next?

Other statistics include which are your most popular pages both entry and exit wise. It’s not always your home page! An article or other static page may be more popular due to the keywords on it, and providing the visitor with quality information they were looking for.

Monitoring pages is particularly useful if your website is intended to convince a user to perform a certain ‘call to action’. A call to action can be anything from clicking on a link, purchasing a program or submitting their email address to your newsletter list. Are your pages performing well for the purpose you need?

Web analytics tools are incredibly useful. You can use the information to better your content, increase your marketing if a particular keyword is performing well, and monitor your audience by demographic. It is essential for any modern day online business.