How to Understand Web Analytics for Your Outdoor Business
If you’re new to the world of web analytics, it can feel overwhelming and confusing. 😅 But you know as an outdoor business owner, you need to understand your website metrics.
In this article, you’ll learn:
What web analytics is
Why web analytics is important for your business
Different types of metrics used in web analytics
As of 2023, the outdoor industry had 4,607 hiking and outdoor equipment brands in the U.S. alone. And it’s only the outdoor brands that specialize in outdoor equipment.
The outdoor industry is HUGE and almost all its businesses have a website. Learning how web analytics work will help you improve your site. And make it stand out from the other outdoor businesses in the market.
What Is Web Analytics?
Web analytics measure how your site is doing — what’s going well and where you can improve. Data generated by the people who visit and interact with your website make up web analytics. You can use this data to:
Identify and measure website visitors’ behavior
Fine-tune your website’s user experience
Gain valuable insights that can help you maximize conversions and sales
Many popular website-building platforms have built-in tools that collect data. You use this data to analyze your website performance.
If the one you're using doesn’t offer that, you can also download independent web analytic tools. A quick Google search will give you a bunch of different options.
Why Is Web Analytics Important?
So, why is web analytics important for the success of your business? And why do you need to understand the different terms used in web analytics?
First of all, you need web analytics to…
Help you make business decisions
Make adjustments to your website so it’s more user-friendly
Determine what content performs the best on your site
Understand your audience better
Web analytics give you the knowledge you need to make informed business decisions. And you can adjust your strategies based on the insight web analytics gives you.
You need to understand the basics of web analytics to correctly interpret the data. If you misinterpret the data, you run the risk of hurting your business growth.
Website Analytics Terms: Understand Your Metrics
In this section, you'll learn terms used in website analytics. This way you can understand what you’re looking at when you go to analyze your data.
I've included the industry standards (where applicable) as a benchmark. You can see how your website compares to the industry averages. By doing this, you identify where you can improve — and where you're already killing it.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a traffic analysis metric. It measures how many of your site visitors click away from your website after viewing only one page. Your bounce rate is a percentage.
Industry Standard: Average bounce rate regardless of industry is 55.43%.
The higher the percentage, the worse your bounce rate is. You want a lower percentage for this metric.
Conversion Rate
So what’s a conversion? Good question! It’s when a lead completes a desired action. This could be buying a product, signing up for an email list, or clicking a link.
You find the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of site visitors. You'll see this metric listed as a percentage.
Industry Standard: The average conversion rate is between two and five percent. Anything higher than five percent is above average.
The higher your percentage is for this metric, the better your conversion rate is.
Visitors & Unique Visitors
Visitors and unique visitors both measure the number of users who come to your site. You'll see this metric displayed as a number.
Visitors measure the total number of times users visit your site. If a single user visits more than once, this metric includes each time in the total number of site visitors.
Industry Standard: The average number of visitors per month for medium-sized businesses is 10,000.
Unique visitors only count the number of individual users that visit your site.
Pageviews & Unique Views
Pageviews and unique views both measure the number of visits to your pages. You'll see this metric displayed as a number.
Pageviews keep track of every visit to a particular page. So if there’s a user that comes back to a page more than once, the analytics tool will add each visit to the total pageviews.
Industry Standard: For a small business, the average number of pageviews per month is about 1,000. For a larger business, the industry average can be around 10,000 per month.
Unique views only count site visits from individual users. So if one user visits your site ten times, it will only count as one unique view. Your unique views number will always be lower than your pageviews number.
Traffic Sources
A traffic source is how people find and visit your website. It’s where they’re coming from. It will keep track of how many users come from which places.
A direct visit count is when a user clicks onto your website on their own after a web search. Some other common traffic sources include:
LinkedIn
Instagram
Facebook
Email
Backlink
This metric helps you understand how people are finding your website. It’s great to help decide where to focus your energy when it comes to generating leads.
Page Visits
Page visits and pageviews sound very similar but are VERY different. The pageviews metric includes every time a user visits a page on your site. (Including every time they go to a different page on your website OR if they reload a page on your website.)
Page visits include ONLY when a user comes to your website from an outside source. For example, Google or they clicked on a link from another website.
Average Time on Page or Average Duration
The average time on page (or average duration) metric keeps track of how long a user spends on your website. It will display as an amount of time.
Industry Standard: The average time on a page is 54 seconds. For blogs, the average duration is closer to two to four minutes.
The fact that the average time on a page is only 54 seconds might surprise you. The longer a visitor spends on a page, the better.
Page Load Speed
Page load speed is the length of time it takes for a page on your website to load. The page load speed is also a factor in your site’s SEO (search engine optimization) score.
Industry Standard: The recommended load time from Google is under two seconds.
No one likes waiting for pages to load. Think about how often you click away from a website if it’s taking too long to load. The shorter you can make the load time, the better.
Sessions
Sessions include a group of user interactions that happen in a specific time frame. A session could include:
Page views
Transactions
Events
Social Interactions
Clicks
A typical session lasts until the user goes 30 minutes with no activity. Taking a look at sessions is another great way to help you understand the people who visit your site.
Pages Per Session
Pages per session measures the average number of pages a user visits on your site per session. You'll see this metric recorded as a number.
Industry Standard: On average, users visit 1.7 to 4.0 pages per session.
To get this metric divide the number of pageviews by the number of sessions for a specific time.
Exit Pages
Exit pages are the pages on your website where users decide to leave. They are the pages users last visited before clicking away.
Learn where your audience leaves your website. Then you can determine where to place strategic CTAs (call to action).
Exit Rate
The exit rate shows how often visitors leave from a certain page. You'll see this metric displayed as a percentage. The lower the percentage, the better your exit rate.
Industry Standard: The average exit rate is between 20% to 30%.
You can find the exit rate by the number of exits divided by the number of pageviews for a specific page.
Device Sources
Device sources tell you what kind of device your audience accesses your website from. It can tell you if your visitors are using a desktop or mobile device when they visit your site.
Knowing this can help you optimize your user experience. For example, most of your visitors might look at your website when they’re on their phones. If that's the case, then you want to make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
Repeat Visit Rate
Repeat visit rate is the percentage of visitors that visit your site more than once.
Industry Standard: The average repeat visit rate is over 30%.
You want this percentage to be as high as possible. This means your website is appealing enough for your audience to come back again and again.
Engagement Data
Engagement data shows you what users do when they visit your website. This type of data can include the following metrics:
Clicks
Likes
Shares
Comments
Form completion
The engagement data helps you see how your leads like to interact with your brand.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is free traffic. It’s the visitors who come to your website from unpaid sources. In other words, they find your website themselves and not from an ad you ran.
Improving your website’s SEO score increases your organic traffic. Organic traffic comes from:
Google or other search engine searches
Blog posts
Social media
In general, you want to increase the amount of organic traffic your website sees. This allows more people to find your business without you having to spend lots of money and time on ads.
Backlinks
Backlinks are when another website includes a link to your website. 👀 For example, I include backlinks in this article that link back to the sources I used to find the statistics.
When other sites backlink to your website, it increases your organic traffic. The more backlinks you can get to your website, the better.
Keywords
This is a term used a lot when talking about search engine optimization (SEO). Your website can rank in search engines for certain keywords.
Most web analytics tools can tell you if your site ranks for certain keywords. Or if people are finding your site when they search for specific keywords.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is the number of users that find and click on your website from a Google search. You'll see this metric shown as a number.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is the number of visitors who come to your website from other domains. This does not include when users find you from a Google search.
This metric will tell you where users come from when they find your site from an outside source. Such as:
A link from another website (backlink)
Social media platform
A link from an email
Referral traffic lets you see which platforms gain you the most website traffic. It's great to keep in mind when you want to decide which platforms to direct your time, energy, and resources to.
The Next Step: Improving Your Metrics
Now you understand the basic metrics used in web analytics. The next step is to identify where your numbers are and how they compare to the industry standards. Then you can see which of your metrics need a little more TLC.
If you want help improving your website, a great place to start is to work with a copywriter. A skilled copywriter can create:
Engaging Website Copy. Keep visitors on your page for longer and increase the chance they come back again and again.
SEO-Optimized Homepage Copy. Improve your site’s searchability and user experience.
SEO-Optimized Blog Posts. Increase your organic traffic, while building your site’s authority at the same time.
Click on the button below to schedule a FREE discovery call with Hazel Jones Copywriting.
