“You cannot improve what you cannot measure”

The Importance of Website Analytics

Website analytics is the key to knowing who your customers are, where they are coming from, and which ones are converting to products or services sold through your website. Without website analytics, you might as well be throwing away the time and money spent on developing your existing website.  Website analytics helps you monitor the visitors to your website.

Using analytics, you will know exactly:

• What day a visitor came to your website
• How long they stayed on your site
• What pages they visited
• The geographical location of that visitor
• How long they stayed on each individual page
• What page the customer left your site from
• What source they came from or found your website through
• Keywords they may have used to find you in the search engines
• How many times a particular visitor returned to your website

The Three Main aspects of Website Analytics

Traffic Sources

You can study each individual source of traffic to see how well it is converting. With this information you can identify the type of search phrase or link that sends the most valuable customers to your site. Then you can put your SEO efforts into getting more of this valuable traffic from similar areas.

Site Behaviour

By tracking the progress of visitors at your website you can learn some very useful information. If you study the data on how long visitors stay on certain landing pages and how well different sales pages convert, you can make improvements to your site. By changing the under-performing pages to be more like the most effective ones, you can significantly increase your overall conversion rate.

Online Marketing

Using Website Analytics you can look into other forms of online marketing to assess their effectiveness.  You can track the number of visitors from a specific advert that go on to make a conversion at your site. This information will tell you if the advert is worth the cost you are paying. It will also allow you to make accurate predictions about how you should change your advertising budget, and how those changes would affect profit levels.
Other forms of marketing such as email campaigns and pay-per-click advertising can also be tracked so you can continually improve your marketing efforts to make them more profitable.

Target Audience

The workshop will be held at Oldwalls Leisure, Swansea and targeted towards those currently in the tourism sector.  Local tourism is more important today than ever, it is imperative that local businesses benefit from increased visitors (physically and online) bringing much needed money into local villages and the area of Swansea.

Assumptions of the audience:

• Audience will be approx. 30 seats
• Will own a website relating to the tourism sector
• They may be members of the Swansea Bay Tourism Association – Hoteliers, Restaurateurs and other members
• Technical knowledge will be from beginner to intermediate
• Interested in using free tools available on the internet to increase exposure of their website
• Be prepared to give 1 hour of their time

Workshop Delivery

Conclusion

This workshop is focused around tools freely available on the internet to benefit local businesses.  During the workshop visitors will be encouraged to ask questions and correlate the tutorial to real life examples within their own businesses. This workshop aims to give the audience a working knowledge of website analytics.  This knowledge can be used immediately to provide instantaneous results within their own websites.

Swansea and the Gower Peninsula is an area of outstanding natural beauty, let’s share this beauty with the world and increase local tourism and spending via online media methods.