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• Top 5 Web Analytics Tools for Your Site

  11 août 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips

  At the start of July 2023, Universal Analytics (UA) users had to say goodbye to their preferred web analytics tool as Google discontinued it. While some find Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can do what they need, many GA4 users are starting to realise GA4 doesn’t meet all the needs UA once fulfilled. Consequently, they are actively seeking another web analytics tool to complement GA4 and address those unmet requirements effectively.

  In this article, we’ll break down five of the top web analytics tools on the market. You’ll find details about their core capabilities, pricing structures and some noteworthy pros and cons to help you decide which tool is the right fit for you. We’ve also included some key features a good web analytics tool should have to give you a baseline for comparison.

  Whether you’re a marketing manager focused on ROI of campaigns, a web analyst focused on conversions or simply interested in learning more about web analytics, there’s something for you on this list.

  What is a web analytics tool ?

  Web analytics tools collect and analyse information about your website’s visitors, their behaviour and the technical performance of your site. A web analytics tool compiles, measures and analyses website data to give you the information you need to improve site performance, boost conversions and increase your ROI.

  What makes a web analytics tool good ?

  Before we get into tool specifics, let’s go over some of the core features you can expect from a web analytics tool.

  For a web analytics tool to be worth your time (and money), it needs to cover the basics. For example :

  • Visitor reports : The number of visitors, whether they were unique or repeat visitors, the source of traffic (where they found your website), device information (if they’re using a desktop or mobile device) and demographic information like geographic location

  • Behaviour reports : What your visitors did while on your site, conversion rates (e.g., if they signed up for or purchased something), the pages they entered and exited from, average session duration, total time spent on a page and bounce rates (if they left without interacting with anything)

  • Technical information : Page loading speed and event tracking — where users are clicking, what they’re downloading or sharing from your site, if they’re engaging with the media on it and how far down the page they’re scrolling

  • Marketing campaign information : Breakdowns of ad campaigns by provider, showing if ads resulted in traffic to your site and lead to an eventual sale or conversion

  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) information : Which keywords on which pages are driving traffic to your site, and what search engines are they coming from

  • Real-time data tracking : Visitor, behaviour and technical information available in real-time, or close to it — allowing you to address to issues as they occur

  • Data visualisation : Charts and graphs illustrating the above information in an easily-readable format — helping identify opportunities and providing valuable insights you can leverage to improve site performance, conversion rates and the amount of time visitors spend on a page

  • Custom reporting : Create custom reports detailing the desired metrics and time frame you’re interested in

  • Security : User access controls and management tools to limit who can see and interact with user data

  • Resources : Official user guides, technical documentation, troubleshooting materials, customer support and community forums

  

  Pros and Cons of Google Analytics 4

  Despite many users’ dissatisfaction, GA4 isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s still a powerful tool with all the standard features you’d expect. It’s the most popular choice for web analytics for a few other reasons, too, including :

  • It’s free to use
  • It’s easy to set up
  • It has a convenient mobile app
  • It has a wealth of user documentation and technical resources online
  • Its machine-learning capabilities help predict user behaviour and offer insights on how to grow your site
  • It integrates easily with other Google tools, like Google Search Console, Google Ads and Google Cloud

  That said, it comes with some serious drawbacks. Many users accustomed to UA have reported being unhappy with the differences between it and GA4. Their reasons range from changes to the user interface and bounce rate calculations, as well as Google’s switch from pageview-focused metrics to event-based ones. 

  Let’s take a look at some of the other cons :

  • Lack of privacy, as Google uses data from Google Analytics for advertising purposes.
  • Cookie consent banners can frustrate visitors, and with 40-60% of web visitors rejecting consent, relying on them can lead to inaccurate data and an incomplete view of your web traffic and campaign outcomes.
  • Can’t import data from UA to GA4 
  • Missing features like heatmaps and session recording
  • Google Analytics 360, the GA for enterprises, costs $150,000/year

  Now that you know GA4’s strengths and weaknesses, it’s time to explore other tools that can help fill in GA4’s gaps.

  Top 5 web analytics tools (that aren’t Google)

  Below is a list of popular web analytics tools that, unless otherwise stated, have all the features a good tool should have.

  Adobe Analytics

  

  Adobe is a trusted name in software, with tools that have shaped the technological landscape for decades, like Photoshop and Illustrator. With web design and UX tools Dreamweaver and XD, it makes sense that they’d offer a web analytics platform as well.

  Adobe Analytics provides not just web analytics but marketing analytics that tell you about customer acquisition and retention, ROI and ad campaign performance metrics. Its machine learning (ML) and AI-powered analytics predict future customer behaviour based on previously collected data.

  Key features : 

  • Multichannel data collection that covers computers, mobile devices and IoT devices
  • Adobe Sensei (AI/ML) for marketing attribution and anomaly detection
  • Tag management through Adobe Experience Platform Launch simplifies the tag creation and maintenance process to help you track how users interact with your site

  Pros :

  • User-friendly and simple to learn with a drag-and-drop interface
  • When integrated with other Adobe software, it becomes a powerful solution for enterprises
  • Saves your team a lot of time with the recommendations and insights automatically generated by Adobe’s AI/ML

  Cons :

  • No free version
  • Adobe Sensei and tag manager limited to premium version
  • Expensive, especially when combined with the company’s other software
  • Steep learning curve for both setup and use

  Mobile app : Yes

  Integrations : Integrates with Adobe Experience Manager Sites, the company’s CMS. Adobe Target, a CRO tool and part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud subscription, integrates with Analytics.

  Pricing : Available upon request

  Matomo

  

  Matomo is the leading open-source web analytics solution designed to help you make more informed decisions and enhance your customer experience while ensuring GDPR compliance and user privacy. With Matomo Cloud, your data is stored in Europe, while Matomo On-Premise allows you to host your data on your own servers.

  Matomo is used on over 1 million websites, in over 190 countries, and in over 50 languages. Additionally, Matomo is an all-in-one solution, with traditional web analytics (visits, acquisition, etc.) alongside behavioural analytics (heatmaps, session recordings and more), plus a tag manager. No more inefficiently jumping back and forth between tabs in a huge tech stack. It’s all in Matomo, for one consistent, seamless and efficient experience. 

  Key features : 

  • Heatmaps and session recording to display what users are clicking on and how individual users interacted with your site 
  • A/B testing to compare different versions of the same content and see which gets better results
  • Robust API that lets you get insights by connecting your data to other platforms, like data visualisation or business intelligence tools

  Pros : 

  • Open-source, reviewed by experts to ensure that it’s secure
  • Offers On-Premise or Cloud-hosted options
  • Fully compliant with GDPR, so you can be data-driven without worrying. 
  • Option to run without cookies, meaning in most countries you can use Matomo without annoying cookie consent banners and while getting more accurate data
  • You retain complete ownership of your data, with no third parties using it for advertising or unspecified “own purposes”

  Cons : 

  • On-Premise is free, but that means an additional cost for advanced features (A/B testing, heatmaps, etc.) that are included by default on Matomo Cloud
  • Matomo On-Premise requires servers and technical expertise to setup and manage

  Mobile app : Matomo offers a free mobile app (iOS and Android) so you can access your analytics on the go. 

  Integrations : Matomo integrates easily with many other tools and platforms, including WordPress, Looker Studio, Magento, Jira, Drupal, Joomla and Cloudflare.

  Pricing : 

  • Varies based on monthly hits
  • Matomo On-Premise : free
  • Matomo Cloud : starting at €19/month

  Mixpanel

  

  Mixpanel’s features are heavily geared toward e-commerce companies. From the moment a visitor lands on your website to the moment they enter their payment details and complete a transaction, Mixpanel tracks these events.

  Similar to GA4, Mixpanel is an event-focused analytics platform. While you can still track pageviews with Mixpanel, its main focus is on the specific actions users take that lead them to purchases. Putting your attention on this information allows you to find out which events on your site are going through the sales funnel.

  They’re currently developing a Warehouse Events feature to simplify the process of importing data lakes and data warehouses.

  Key features :

  • Custom alerts and anomaly detection
  • Boards, which allow you to share multiple reports and insights with your team in a range of visual styles 
  • Detailed segmentation reporting that lets you break down your data to the individual user, specific event or geographic level

  Pros :

  • Boards allow for emojis, gifs, images and videos to make collaboration fun
  • Powerful mobile analytics for iOS and Android apps
  • Free promotional credits for eligible startups 

  Cons :

  • Limited features in free plan
  • Best features limited to the Enterprise-tier subscription
  • Complicated set up
  • Steep learning curve

  Mobile app : No

  Integrations : Mixpanel has a load of integrations, including Figma, Google Cloud, Slack, HappyFox, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, Optimizely, Mailchimp and Tenjin. They also have a WordPress plugin.

  Pricing : 

  • Starter : free plan available
  • Growth : $20/month
  • Enterprise $833/month

  HubSpot Marketing

  

  HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform with marketing, sales, customer service, content management system (CMS) and operations tools. This greater ecosystem of HubSpot software allows you to practically run your entire business in one place.

  Even though HubSpot Marketing isn’t a dedicated web analytics tool, it provides comparable standard metrics as the other tools on this list, albeit without the more advanced analytical metrics they offer. If you’re already using HubSpot to host your website, it’s definitely worth consideration.

  Key features :

  • Customer Journey Analytics presents the steps your customers went through in the sales process, step-by-step, in a visual way
  • Dashboards for your reports, including both fully customisable options for power users and pre-made templates for new users

  Pros :

  • Integration with other HubSpot tools, like HubSpot CRM’s free live chat widget 
  • User-friendly interface with many features being drag-and-drop, like the report dashboard
  • 24/7 customer support

  Cons :

  • Can get expensive with upgrades and other HubSpot tool add ons
  • Not a dedicated web analytics tool, so it’s missing some of the features other tools have, like heatmaps
  • Not really worth it as a standalone tool
  • Some users report customer support is unhelpful

  Mobile app : Yes

  Integrations : The larger HubSpot CRM platform can connect with nearly 1,500 other apps through the HubSpot App Marketplace. These include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Make, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, Shopify, monday.com, Stripe, WooCommerce and hundreds of others.

  Pricing : 

  • Starter : $20/month ($18/month with annual plan) 
  • Professional : $890/month ($800/month with annual plan) 
  • Enterprise : $3,600/month ($43,200 billed annually)

  Kissmetrics

  

  Kissmetrics is a web analytics tool that is marketed toward SaaS and ecommerce companies. They label themselves as “person-based” because they combine event-based tracking with detailed user profiles of the visitors to your site, which allows you to gain insights into customer behaviour. 

  With user profiles, you can drill down to see how many times someone has visited your site, if they’ve purchased from you and the steps they took before completing a sale. This allows you to cater more to these users and drive growth.

  Key features : 

  • Person Profiles that give granular information about individual users and their activities on your site
  • Campaigns, an engagement messenger application, allows you to set up email automations that are triggered by specific events
  • Detailed reporting tools 

  Pros : 

  • No third-party cookies
  • No data sampling
  • APIs for Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Python and PHP

  Cons : 

  • Difficult installation
  • Strongest reporting features only available in the most expensive plan
  • Reports can be slow to generate
  • Requires custom JavaScript code to tack single-page applications
  • Doesn’t track demographic data, bounce rate, exits, session length or time on page

  Mobile app : No

  Integrations : Kissmetrics integrates with HubSpot, Appcues, Slack, Mailchimp, Shopify, WooCommerce, Recurly and a dozen others. There is also a Kissmetrics WordPress plugin.

  Pricing : 

  • Silver : $299/month (small businesses)
  • Gold : $499/month (medium) 
  • Platinum : custom pricing (enterprises)

  Conclusion

  In this article, you learned about popular tools for web analytics to better inform you of your options. Despite all of GA4’s shortcomings, by complementing it with another web analytics tool, teams can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their website traffic and enhance their overall analytics capabilities.

  If you want an option that delivers powerful insights while keeping privacy, security and compliance at the forefront, you should try Matomo. 

  Try Matomo alongside Google Analytics now to see how it compares.

  Start your 21-day free trial now – no credit card required.

• Increasing Website Traffic : 11 Tips To Attract Visitors

  25 août 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  For your website and business to succeed, you need to focus on building traffic.

  However, you aren’t the only one with that goal in mind.

  There are millions of other websites trying to increase their traffic as well. With that much competition, it’s important to make sure your website stands out. Accomplishing that can require a great deal of strategy.

  We’ve compiled a list of tips to help you develop a solid plan for increasing website traffic, to expand your reach, grow your audience and boost customer engagement levels — creating more opportunities for your business.Using these tips, more visitors will find their way to your website — meaning more customers for your business.

  Why is website traffic important ?

  Website traffic is essentially the number of people visiting your website. When someone lands on your site, they’re considered a visitor and increase your website traffic. 

  When your website traffic is high, you’ll get more clicks, customer interactions and brand engagement. As a result, search engines will have a positive impression of your website and send more people there, meaning even more people will see your content and have the opportunity to buy your product.

  When using a website for your business or any other venture, tracking your website traffic using a web analytics solution like Matomo is critical.

  

  With over 200 million actively maintained and visited websites in 2023, it’s important to make sure yours stands out if you want to increase your website traffic and grow your online presence. 

  11 tips for increasing website traffic

  Here are 11 tips to increase your organic traffic and elevate your business.

  1. Perfect your SEO

  Optimising your website to show up in search engine results shouldn’t be overlooked, as 63% of consumers start researching a product by using a search engine. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, increases the visibility and discoverability of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO targets organic searches, which means it doesn’t add to social media traffic, direct traffic or referrals, and it isn’t paid traffic.

  SEO is number one on this list for a reason — most of these tips will directly, or indirectly, improve your SEO efforts. 

  Steps to improve your search engine optimisation can include :

  • Using relevant keywords that are incorporated naturally throughout your content
  • Using a web analytics tool like Matomo, with its search keyword feature, to gain insights and identify opportunities for improvement
  • Using descriptive meta titles and meta descriptions
  • Link to your own content internally with descriptive anchor tags, and make sure unused pages are removed 
  • Keeping your target audience in mind and marketing your content toward them
  • Making sure your website’s structure is optimised to be mobile-friendly, fast and responsive — such as with Matomo’s SEO Web Vitals feature, which monitors key metrics like your website’s page speed and loading performance, pivotal for optimising search engine results

  2. Research the competition

  It’s important to remember that while your business might be unique, it’s likely not the only one in its field. Thousands of other websites from other companies are also looking to improve their website traffic and increase sales, and you have to outcompete them.

  Looking at what your competitors are doing is vital from a strategic perspective. You can see what their content looks like, how they’re framing their specific use cases and what target audience they’re marketing toward.

  Knowing what your competitors are doing can help you find ways to improve your content and make it unique. Are your competitors missing a specific use case or neglecting a particular audience ? Fill in their content gaps on your website, and pick up the traffic they’re missing.

  3. Create high-quality, evergreen content

  If your content is high-quality, visitors will read more of it and stay longer on your site. This obviously increases the likelihood they will purchase your product or service, and it tells search engines that your website is a good answer for a search query.

  High-quality content will also be shared more often, leading to even more website traffic. You should aim to develop content that doesn’t lose relevance over time (aka “evergreen content”). If you include time-sensitive data, statistics or content in your website, blog posts or articles, it’ll be relevant only around that time frame. 

  While this month’s viral content is highly popular, it likely won’t be relevant in a few months. Instead, if you ensure your content is evergreen, it will continue to get engagement long after it’s published.

  4. Implement creative visuals

  It’s important to have engaging, fun and interactive media on your website to keep visitors on your site longer. Like good content, interesting visuals (and the resulting longer visits) can translate to more purchases (and favourable assessments by search engines).

  

  Media can take the form of videos, infographics, images or web graphics. 

  With Matomo’s Media Analytics feature, you can automatically gain even deeper insights into how your visitors engage with your media content, enhancing your understanding of their preferences and behaviours.

  If you have interesting, captivating visuals, visitors will be more likely to stay on your website longer and see what you have to offer. Without captivating visuals to break up walls of text, you’ll likely find visitors will tend to leave your site in favour of something more engaging.

  Just make sure you design your visuals with your target audience in mind. Flashy, fun graphics might not be a good fit for a professional audience, but they’re great for younger audiences. If you get your audience correct, they may also share the images with others. Depending on your business, that might be a useful infographic shared across LinkedIn, or a picture of a clever use case shared on Pinterest. 

  As a bonus, if other companies use your graphics on their websites, that earns you some backlinks — more on those in a bit.

  5. Create a comprehensive knowledge base

  Having a knowledge base is critical to making sure your service or product is well understood and well documented, especially in the tech industry. If a visitor or potential customer is interested in your product or service, they need to know exactly what it will do for them and that they have a good foundation of support in case they need help. A knowledge base is also a good place for internal links (more on those in a bit).

  Visitors can also use your knowledge base as a source of information, and if they cite you as a source, that’ll lead right back to more website traffic for you (see our backlinks section for more about this). If your website is a good source of information, visitors will come back to it again and again.

  6. Use social media often and consistently

  Digital marketing nowadays heavily relies on social media platforms. Having an online presence no longer means just having a website — if you’re not using social media sites, you’re missing out on a huge portion of potential visitors and customers.

  A strong social media presence with profiles on platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram or LinkedIn can be invaluable for increasing your website traffic. Visitors to your social media profiles will click on regularly shared content, read your blog posts and possibly become customers.

  Participating in relevant communities and networking with other companies in groups in your industry can also be invaluable. If you participate in online communities and forums for your niche, you can offer insight, answer questions and plug your website. All of this will increase your clicks, which will increase your website traffic.

  If you’ve managed to build your own community on social media, make sure to keep them engaged ! Implementing your own forum, hosting live chats and Q&As, offering helpful and engaging content will make sure visitors keep coming back and spreading the word. 

  7. Use email marketing or newsletters

  Having an email list and sending marketing emails or newsletters is a great way to increase website traffic. You can offer exclusive content, and promise discounts or resources to your subscribers for when they return to your website. This will help keep your loyal audience engaged, entice new customers to subscribe to your newsletter, give you a chance to upsell to people who have already expressed an interest in your product and potentially convert curious subscribers into customers.

  8. Make sure your content can earn backlinks

  A backlink is when a website links to a different website — ideally using relevant anchor text — and it’s an effective strategy for increasing referral traffic, that is, visitors who get to your website via a link on another website. The more backlinks you have, the more your referral traffic will increase. Social share buttons make it easy for people to cite you on social platforms, too. 

  We’ve already talked about making expert content that’s link-worthy, but also make sure that you’re creating linkable assets (like those interesting visuals mentioned earlier), building relationships with other sites that will link to you (like by inviting an expert or influencer to write on your page and promote it from their platform, or by writing your own guest content for their sites) and sharing your own content. All of this can help increase your referral traffic, particularly when you’re linked from websites with a higher domain authority than you have.

  You can also make sure your website is listed in online directories. Some sites will do interviews and roundups, as well — these are great opportunities to increase your backlinks.

  9. Optimise your CTR

  Click-through rate, or CTR, is the percentage of users who click on specific links to your website. A high CTR means your visitors are following a link — whether in an advertisement, a search result or a social media post — and a low CTR means they’re passing it by. Optimising your CTR can greatly improve your website traffic.

  To improve CTR, identify successful elements such as copy, imagery, and offers in your ads, enabling you to amplify effective elements and minimise less impactful ones.

  10. Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly

  If a visitor is frustrated by your site being slow, laggy, clunky or not mobile-friendly, they won’t stay long. That doesn’t look good to search engines if that’s how your visitors got there. Your website needs to be clean, responsive, user-friendly and accessible.

  If your website is slow, try increasing your website’s performance by :

  • Optimising images : Reduce the size of images and compress them for faster load times. Opt for JPEG format for photos and PNG format for graphics. 
  • Limit the use of plugins : If you are using a CMS like WordPress, consider removing plugins that are unnecessary or not essential.
  • Embrace lazy loading : To further enhance site speed and reduce initial load times, set up your site to load images and content only as visitors scroll down. Prioritising the content and images at the top of the page makes the site feel faster. Some CMS platforms will offer this option, but others may require a bit of coding to set this up. 

  Many people rely on their phones to research services or products, especially if they’re doing a quick search. Make sure your website is friendly to mobile users. It should scale vertically and scroll smoothly so users aren’t frustrated when using your site. They should be able to find the info they need immediately without any technical issues.

  11. Track your website’s metrics

  As you test out each of these strategies to increase your web traffic, don’t forget to closely analyse the performance of your site. To truly understand the impact of your efforts, you’ll need a reliable web analytics solution. Think of a dependable web analytics solution as your website’s GPS. Without it, you’d be lost, unsure of your direction and missing out on valuable insights to steer your growth.

  Matomo is a powerful web analytics tool that can help you do just that by providing information on your site visitors and campaign performance, complemented by an array of behavioural analytics features that delve into user interactions. Among these, our heatmap feature stands out, enabling greater insights into user interactions and optimisation of your site’s effectiveness.

  

  Google Analytics is another powerful analytics option, though it has challenges with data accuracy ; there are multiple other web analytics solutions as well.

  Regardless of what web analytics solution you choose, the process of analysing your website metrics is incredibly important for identifying areas of improvement to increase website traffic.

  Increasing your web traffic is a process

  Increasing website traffic isn’t something you accomplish overnight. It’s a comprehensive, ongoing endeavour that requires constant analysis and fine-tuning. 

  By applying these tips to create consistent, high-quality content that gets spotlighted on search engines, shared on social media and returned to again and again, you’ll see a steady stream of increased traffic. 

  With Matomo, you can understand your visitor behaviour to see what works and what doesn’t as you work to increase your website traffic. Get your free 21-day trial now. No credit card required.

• How to Use Analytics & Reports for Marketing, Sales & More

  28 septembre 2023, par Erin — Analytics Tips

  By now, most professionals know they should be using analytics and reports to make better business decisions. Blogs and thought leaders talk about it all the time. But most sources don’t tell you how to use analytics and reports. So marketers, salespeople and others either skim whatever reports they come across or give up on making data-driven decisions entirely. 

  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

  In this article, we’ll cover what analytics and reports are, how they differ and give you examples of each. Then, we’ll explain how clean data comes into play and how marketing, sales, and user experience teams can use reports and analytics to uncover actionable insights.

  What’s the difference between analytics & reports ? 

  Many people speak of reports and analytics as if the terms are interchangeable, but they have two distinct meanings.

  A report is a collection of data presented in one place. By tracking key metrics and providing numbers, reports tell you what is happening in your business. Analytics is the study of data and the process of generating insights from data. Both rely on data and are essential for understanding and improving your business results.

  

  A science experiment is a helpful analogy for how reporting and analytics work together. To conduct an experiment, scientists collect data and results and compile a report of what happened. But the process doesn’t stop there. After generating a data report, scientists analyse the data and try to understand the why behind the results.

  In a business context, you collect and organise data in reports. With analytics, you then use those reports and their data to draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t.

  Reports examples 

  Reports are a valuable tool for just about any part of your business, from sales to finance to human resources. For example, your finance team might collect data about spending and use it to create a report. It might show how much you spend on employee compensation, real estate, raw materials and shipping.

  On the other hand, your marketing team might benefit from a report on lead sources. This would mean collecting data on where your sales leads come from (social media, email, organic search, etc.). You could collect and present lead source data over time for a more in-depth report. This shows which sources are becoming more effective over time. With advanced tools, you can create detailed, custom reports that include multiple factors, such as time, geographical location and device type.

  

  Analytics examples 

  Because analytics requires looking at and drawing insights from data and reports to collect and present data, analytics often begins by studying reports. 

  In our example of a report on lead sources, an analytics professional might study the report and notice that webinars are an important source of leads. To better understand this, they might look closely at the number of leads acquired compared to how often webinars occur. If they notice that the number of webinar leads has been growing, they might conclude that the business should invest in more webinars to generate more leads. This is just one kind of insight analytics can provide.

  For another example, your human resources team might study a report on employee retention. After analysing the data, they could discover valuable insights, such as which teams have the highest turnover rate. Further analysis might help them uncover why certain teams fail to keep employees and what they can do to solve the problem.

  The importance of clean data 

  Both analytics and reporting rely on data, so it’s essential your data is clean. Clean data means you’ve audited your data, removed inaccuracies and duplicate entries, and corrected mislabelled data or errors. Basically, you want to ensure that each piece of information you’re using for reports and analytics is accurate and organised correctly.

  If your data isn’t clean and accurate, neither will your reports be. And making business decisions based on bad data can come at a considerable cost. Inaccurate data might lead you to invest in a channel that appears more valuable than it actually is. Or it could cause you to overlook opportunities for growth. Moreover, poor data maintenance and the poor insight it provides will lead your team to have less trust in your reports and analytics team.

  The simplest way to maintain clean data is to be meticulous when inputting or transferring data. This can be as simple as ensuring that your sales team fills in every field of an account record. When you need to import or transfer data from other sources, you need to perform quality assurance (QA) checks to make sure data is appropriately labelled and organised. 

  Another way to maintain clean data is by avoiding cookies. Most web visitors reject cookie consent banners. When this happens, analysts and marketers don’t get data on these visitors and only see the percentage of users who accept tracking. This means they decide on a smaller sample size, leading to poor or inaccurate data. These banners also create a poor user experience and annoy web visitors.

  Matomo can be configured to run cookieless — which, in most countries, means you don’t need to have an annoying cookie consent screen on your site. This way, you can get more accurate data and create a better user experience.

  Marketing analytics and reports 

  Analytics and reporting help you measure and improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. They help you learn what’s working and what you should invest more time and money into. And bolstering the effectiveness of your marketing will create more opportunities for sales.

  

  One common area where marketing teams use analytics and reports is to understand and improve their keyword rankings and search engine optimization. They use web analytics platforms like Matomo to report on how their website performs for specific keywords. Insights from these reports are then used to inform changes to the website and the development of new content.

  As we mentioned above, marketing teams often use reports on lead sources to understand how their prospects and customers are learning about the brand. They might analyse their lead sources to better understand their audience. 

  For example, if your company finds that you receive a lot of leads from LinkedIn, you might decide to study the content you post there and how it differs from other platforms. You could apply a similar content approach to other channels to see if it increases lead generation. You can then study reporting on how lead source data changes after you change content strategies. This is one example of how analysing a report can lead to marketing experimentation. 

  Email and paid advertising are also marketing channels that can be optimised with reports and analysis. By studying the data around what emails and ads your audience clicks on, you can draw insights into what topics and messaging resonate with your customers.

  

  Marketing teams often use A/B testing to learn about audience preferences. In an A/B test, you can test two landing page versions, such as two different types of call-to-action (CTA) buttons. Matomo will generate a report showing how many people clicked each version. From those results, you may draw an insight into the design your audience prefers.

  Sales analytics and reports 

  Sales analytics and reports are used to help teams close more deals and sell more efficiently. They also help businesses understand their revenue, set goals, and optimise sales processes. And understanding your sales and revenue allows you to plan for the future.

  One of the keys to building a successful sales strategy and team is understanding your sales cycle. That’s why it’s so important for companies to analyse their lead and sales data. For business-to-business (B2B) companies in particular, the sales cycle can be a long process. But you can use reporting and analytics to learn about the stages of the buying cycle, including how long they take and how many leads proceed to the next step.

  Analysing lead and customer data also allows you to gain insights into who your customers are. With detailed account records, you can track where your customers are, what industries they come from, what their role is and how much they spend. While you can use reports to gather customer data, you also have to use analysis and qualitative information in order to build buyer personas. 

  

  Many sales teams use past individual and business performance to understand revenue trends. For instance, you might study historical data reports to learn how seasonality affects your revenue. If you dive deeper, you might find that seasonal trends may depend on the country where your customers live. 

  

  Conversely, it’s also important to analyse what internal variables are affecting revenue. You can use revenue reports to identify your top-performing sales associates. You can then try to expand and replicate that success. While sales is a field often driven by personal relationships and conversations, many types of reports allow you to learn about and improve the process.

  Website and user behaviour analytics and reports 

  More and more, businesses view their websites as an experience and user behaviour as an important part of their business. And just like sales and marketing, reporting and analytics help you better understand and optimise your web experience. 

  Many web and user behaviour metrics, like traffic source, have important implications for marketing. For example, page traffic and user flows can provide valuable insights into what your customers are interested in. This can then drive future content development and marketing campaigns.

  

  You can also learn about how your users navigate and use your website. A robust web analytics tool, like Matomo, can supply user session recordings and visitor tracking. For example, you could study which pages a particular user visits. But Matomo also has a feature called Transitions that provides visual reports showing where a particular page’s traffic comes from and where visitors tend to go afterward. 

  

  As you consider why people might be leaving your website, site performance is another important area for reporting. Most users are accustomed to near-instantaneous web experiences, so it’s worth monitoring your page load time and looking out for backend delays. In today’s world, your website experience is part of what you’re selling to customers. Don’t miss out on opportunities to impress and delight them.

  Dive into your data

  Reporting and analytics can seem like mysterious buzzwords we’re all supposed to understand already. But, like anything else, they require definitions and meaningful examples. When you dig into the topic, though, the applications for reporting and analytics are endless.

  Use these examples to identify how you can use analytics and reports in your role and department to achieve better results, whether that means higher quality leads, bigger deal size or a better user experience.

  To see how Matomo can collect accurate and reliable data and turn it into in-depth analytics and reports, start a free 21-day trial. No credit card required.