Use Google Analytics, Delight Your Users March 9, 2012 by Sarah Bauer BA English Literature

With traffic tracking tools like Google Analytics, measuring the effectiveness of your website comes down to numbers and figures. User insight is gauged by clicks, time spent browsing, traffic spikes, and number of visits, amongst other trackable web activities. Here you get the hard facts about your website; what works for users, and what doesn’t.  As SixRevisions contributor Claudiu Murariu suggests, “the quality of a web design can only really be measured quantitatively in the results it brings to the site.”

Web analytics are an essential component to any successful web marketing strategy. At Navigator Multimedia, we employ Google Analytics in an ongoing effort to assure that users are interacting with our products to delightful effect.

Delighting users goes beyond satisfying their needs. To do so, you must have a rich impression of how your user explores a website, and what could make the experience memorable.

And here’s where that data comes in.  Google Analytics gives you the statistics for clicks per page, and time spent on pages. Perhaps you have a call-to-action button on the homepage that links to your online catalogue. It may be receiving hundreds of clicks, but are users staying in the catalogue section once they get there?

When you delight a user, you exceed their expectations and create a positive impression of your business brand. When call-to-action button clicks are high, but time spent on the linked page is low, a user expectation was likely met but not exceeded. You provided the user with what they wanted (access to an online catalogue), but failed to compel them to explore further.

Analytics provide designers and site owners with goals. Instead of striking blindly at a site design to rustle up some semblance of a “delightful user experience”, designers can focus on improving pages with high bounce rates*, and monitor the traffic changes after layout and content revisions have been delivered.

While we cannot design to please every user, we can create optimal solutions for a targeted group. We can delight users and build memorable brand associations for long-term effects. Google Analytics provides the data to make it happen. Call Chris or Greg at Navigator Multimedia to get Google Analytics installed for your website today!

*Bounce rate describes the percentage of web users who enter a website and then leave immediately, rather than continue viewing pages on the same site.

Reference

Murariu, Claudio. “How to Measure the Effectiveness of Web Designs.” 7 February 2011.SixRevisions.com: http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/how-to-measure-the-effectiveness-of-web-designs/

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