What You Need to Know Now About Web Analytics
Your website serves a number of purposes. It enables you to inform consumers about what you are offering to them, promote your business to a wide audience, and ultimately drive sales that boost your profits. While these benefits are especially valuable to scaling your business, using your website as a tool that offers insight into viewer trends can also be incredibly helpful in determining the best strategy for attracting potential customers and winning conversions.
Web analytics can help your business grow
Analyzing visitor behavior on a website is referred to as web analytics. A web analytics tool tracks, reviews and reports statistics about web activity, including:
- webpage, image and video viewing
- traffic sources
- average time on site
- referring sites
- page views
- paths taken
- conversion rates
So, say you’re looking for the best way to market a new product that you’re offering. By tracking where visitors came from, how long they stayed on the page and how they found the site, you can learn valuable information about visitor patterns and implement strategies to grab and hold your viewers’ attention.
Get to know Google Analytics
Among all the tools available today, Google Analytics may be the most popular and well-known free tool used to track and analyze web traffic data. It allows you to analyze key metrics in a well-organized dashboard that makes data collection easy to view and organize into periodic reports. It’s a great web analytics option for anyone, including beginners and small businesses.
Web properties launched between 2012- 2020 utilized the specific model of Google Analytics called Universal Analytics (UA), where website activity was tracked and organized into specific categories. However, once Google Analytics 4, a later generation of Google Analytics, was released in October 2020, it has since become the default for new websites.
Times are changing.
Google recently announced that in the coming months, UA will be replaced by GA4, which offers upgraded features for more effective data processing. This means that websites using standard Universal Analytics will stop processing new hits and you’ll no longer be able to see your Universal Analytics reports in the Analytics interface or access your data via other software.
Don’t fret yet. We have you covered.
What does this mean for you?
For websites launched after October 14, 2020, there is no need to be concerned. Chances are you’re already using GA4, which you can confirm by following these simple steps. If your website went live before October 14, 2020, however, you’re likely using Universal Analytics, and will lose access to historical data that impacts your business once UA properties are permanently closed on July 1, 2023. Until then, you can continue to use and collect new data on Universal Analytics properties, but you will need to take action and back up your existing data between now and then. After July 1, 2023, you’ll be able to access only your previously processed UA data for six more months, until Jan 1, 2024. Read more details about this here.
How we can help
We know your data is important to you and strongly encourage you to export your historical reports as soon as possible. UA properties must also be converted to GA4 properties so you can continue collecting statistics that help you meet your business goals.
At Creative Web Services we deliver all your website needs with trademark creativity, skill, and speed. Our team can efficiently make the necessary system updates to allow you to continue benefiting from helpful data tracking on your property, using GA4.
Reach out at 201.212.6367 or info@cwsio.com.
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