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• 11 of the Most Effective Conversion Rate Optimisation Best Practices

  14 février 2024, par Erin

  Driving more traffic to your website is hard work, but it’s still only half the battle. 

  You don’t just need to acquire new users ; you need to make sure as many convert as possible to make your digital marketing efforts worthwhile.

  That’s why improving your site’s conversion rate is so important. It will also help you get more value from your existing traffic source and keep you in line with your competitors. It’s also probably a lot easier than you think — especially if you adopt optimisation strategies that have been proven to be profitable time and time again. 

  In this article, we’ll show some of the most powerful, innovative and tried-and-tested conversion rate optimisation strategies you can implement immediately. 

  What is conversion rate optimisation ?

  First, let’s look at what conversion rate optimisation means. Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of improving elements of your website to increase the number of users who take a desired action and turn visitors into customers. 

  Common conversion goals include :

  • Making a purchase
  • Adding an item to a shopping cart
  • Signing up for a newsletter
  • Registering for a free trial
  • Downloading an ebook
  • Watching a video

  It doesn’t matter what your goal is. Using one of the following conversion rate optimisation best practices can send your conversions soaring. 

  11 conversion rate optimisation best practices 

  Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work ? Then use one or more of the following best practices to improve your return on investment. 

  Set a clear goals and hypothesis

  When running an A/B or multivariate test, you need a clear idea of what you are testing and why. 

  A goal (a statement about what you want to achieve) and a hypothesis (a statement about what you expect to happen) clarify the problem you are trying to solve and give you a definitive way to judge the experiment’s results. 

  Confused ? Just use this template :

  We aim to [insert goal] by testing [insert test] on [insert page]. We expect that [insert test] will increase [insert metric] because [insert reason].

  Make sure your goals are directly related to the experiment. If you are testing your CTA button, the goal should be getting more users to click the button. It shouldn’t be a goal further down the conversion funnel, like making a purchase. 

  Start with A/B tests

  A/B testing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to run experiments to improve your current conversion rate. So, it’s no wonder that the A/B testing software market was expected to be worth $1.2 billion in 2023 and hit $3.6 billion by 2033. 

  Also known as split testing, A/B testing allows you to directly compare the conversion performance of two elements on your page, like the colour of your CTA button or your headline copy.

  

  You can go even further with multivariate testing, which lets you test two or more changes against a single control. 

  For example, the screenshot above shows the results of a multivariate test between a standard header, a wide header and a small header using Matomo’s A/B testing tool. As you can see, the wider header has a much higher conversion, and the increase was statistically significant. 

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  Tweak your CTAs

  Calls to action (CTAs) are page elements that prompt users to respond immediately. They are usually buttons but can also be images or plain text links. 

  What your CTAs say, how they look, and where they are placed can greatly impact your site’s conversion rates. As such, this is one of the elements you’ll want to optimise first. 

  There are several tweaks you can test, including your CTA’s :

  • Colour 
  • Length 
  • Copy
  • Placement 

  You can even test the impact of removing CTA banners and using text-based CTAs on your conversion rates.

  You should test out personalising CTAs, too. Research shows that personalised CTAs perform 202% better than standard calls to action. 

  Revise your web copy

  You can use several strategies to improve your website’s copy and generate more conversions. 

  Optimising copy for search engines can increase traffic and generate more conversions, for example. But that shouldn’t make your copy any less impactful. Bear search engines in mind, by all means, but make sure you are speaking to the needs and desires of your potential customers. Your copy needs to convince users that your product can solve their problems. 

  Nowhere is this more important than your headlines. These will be the first thing users read, so make sure they sell your USP and highlight pain points.

  Don’t just guess at the kind of messaging that will move the needle, however. Constantly test new headlines and continue doing so even after you’ve started seeing success. The results may surprise you. TruckersReport, a site that helps people become truck drivers, boosted opt-ins by 21.7% by revising its landing page headline, among other changes. 

  Make sure there are no spelling mistakes in your copy, either. Misspelt words, poor grammar and bad formatting make your website look unprofessional and untrustworthy. Even if the rest of your copy is incredibly enticing, these rookie errors can be enough to turn customers off. 

  Simplify your site’s navigation

  A website’s navigation is an often overlooked factor in conversion rate optimisation, but simplifying it can make it much easier for users to take action. 

  If you’ve ever used a poorly designed e-commerce store, you know how confusing and overwhelming bad navigation can be. Research shows that a whopping 82% of stores don’t divide their navigation into manageable chunks. 

  The trick is to simplify your navigation as much as possible. As you can see in the screenshot below, our navigation only has five headers and a call to action. It’s easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, and you can’t miss the big green CTA button. 

  

  Alternatively, you can test what happens when you completely remove your navigation. Brands usually do this on landing pages where the only action they want the user to take is to make a purchase. 

  

  It’s exactly the strategy we’ve used on our free trial landing page. 

  Leverage heatmaps

  Analytics tools — and heatmaps in particular — can help you understand user behaviour and optimise accordingly. 

  Heatmaps are a visual representation of user interaction on your page. Red and yellow represent high levels of user interaction, and blue and green represent low levels of interaction.

  

  As you can see in the screenshot above, our CTA button has some of the highest levels of engagement on the page, telling us that it’s well-positioned. Given the focus on the site’s navigation, we can also assume we are correct to have a CTA button in there — something we can confirm using our web analytics to see how many users click on it.

  Reduce load time

  Speed matters when it comes to conversions. Fact. 

  Research shows a huge difference in conversion rates between quick and slow sites. For example, a site that loads in one second converts three times better than a site that loads in five seconds. 

  That’s why using a web analytics tool is vital to understand page load times and act accordingly if you think slow speeds are hampering your conversions.

  

  Identifying your slowest pages is easy with Matomo. Just sort your pages by the Avg. Use the page load time metric on the page performance report to identify the pages you want to drive conversions. 

  Next, take steps to improve your page’s load time by :

  • Compressing images
  • Compressing code files or using a more lightweight theme
  • Removing unnecessary plugins
  • Using a content delivery network
  • Improving your hosting

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  Add more trust signals

  Trust is essential when you’re trying to convince customers to make a purchase. In fact, consumers rate trust as one of the top three buying factors, far above a brand’s reputation and whether they love the brand. 

  Adding trust signals to your landing pages, such as customer testimonials, customer reviews, case studies, and other forms of social proof, can transform your conversion rates. If consumers see real people and businesses buy from you, they’ll feel reassured to do the same.

  

  It’s a strategy we use ourselves. Just look at the screenshot from our homepage above. Immediately after our free trial CTA, we display the logos of well-known brands that use our product. 

  Security-focused trust signals are also powerful if you are an online store. Installing an SSL certificate, showing logos of trusted payment providers (like PayPal and Mastercard) can convince people they are spending money at a legitimate store.

  Improve your site’s mobile experience

  More and more people are accessing the internet via their smartphones. In 2022, for instance, there were five billion unique mobile Internet users, meaning more than 60% of the internet population used a smartphone to browse online. 

  Moreover, 76% of U.S. adults make purchases using their smartphones. 

  That means you need to ensure your site’s mobile experience is on-point to increase conversions. 

  Your site should use a mobile-first design, meaning it works perfectly on smartphones and then scales up for desktop users. 

  Trust the data

  Opinions are a fantastic form of inspiration for new A/B tests. But they should never be trusted over cold, hard data. If your test shows the opposite of what you and your team thought would happen, then trust the data and not yourself.

  With that in mind, ensure you collect qualitative and quantitative data during your experiments. Web analytics should always form the backbone of conversion tests, but don’t forget to also use heatmaps, screen recordings, and customer surveys. 

  Keep testing

  There’s no such word as “finished” in the world of A/B testing. Continual testing is key if you want to convert more website visitors. 

  Make sure you aren’t stopping tests prematurely, either. Make sure every A/B and multivariate test reaches a sample size that makes the test statistically significant. 

  Understand your users better with Matomo 

  Whether you run an e-commerce store, a SaaS company, or a service-based business, implementing these conversion rate optimisation best practices could be an easy way to lower your bounce rate and boost your conversion rates.

  But remember, best practices aren’t clear-cut rules. What works for one website may not work for yours. That’s why running your own tests and understanding your visitors’ behaviour is important. 

  Matomo’s web analytics platform is the perfect tool for doing just that. Not only does it come with the tools you need to optimise your conversion rate (like an A/B testing tool, heatmaps and session recordings), but you can also trust the data. Unlike Google Analytics 4 and other tools, Matomo doesn’t use data sampling meaning you have 100% accurate data from which to make better decisions. It’s GDPR compliant and can run cookieless, so no need for cookie consent banners (excluding in the UK and Germany).

  Discover how you can improve your website’s conversions with Matomo by starting a free 21-day trial, no credit card required.

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• What is Funnel Analysis ? A Complete Guide for Quick Results

  25 janvier 2024, par Erin

  Your funnel is leaking.

  You’re losing visitors.

  You’re losing conversions and sales.

  But you don’t know how it’s happening, where it’s happening, or what to do about it.

  The reason ? You aren’t properly analysing your funnels.

  If you want to improve conversions and grow your business, you need to understand how to properly assess your sales funnels to set yourself up for success.

  In this guide, we’ll show you what funnel analysis is, why it’s important, and what steps you need to take to leverage it to improve conversions.

  What is funnel analysis ?

  Every business uses sales funnels, whether they know it or not.

  But most people aren’t analysing them, costing them conversions.

  

  Funnel analysis is a marketing method to analyse the events leading to specific conversion points. 

  It aims to look at the entire journey of potential customers from the moment they first touch base with your website or business to the moment they click “buy.”

  It’s assessing what your audience is doing at every step of the journey.

  By assessing what actions are taking place at scale, you can see where you’re falling short in your sales funnel.

  You’ll see :

  1. Where prospects are falling off.
  2. Where people are converting well.

  By gaining this understanding, you’ll better understand the health of your website’s sales funnels and overall marketing strategy.

  With that knowledge, you can optimise your marketing strategy to patch those leaks, improve conversions and grow your business.

  Why funnel analysis is important

  Funnel analysis is critical because your funnel is your business.

  When you analyse your funnel, you’re analysing your business.

  You’re looking at what’s working and what’s not so you can grow revenue and profit margins.

  Funnel analysis lets you monitor user behaviour to show you the motivation and intention behind their decisions.

  Here are five reasons you need to incorporate funnel analysis into your workflow.

  

  1. Gives insights into your funnel problems

  The core purpose of funnel analysis is to look at what’s going on on your website.

  What are the most effective steps to conversion ?

  Where do users drop off in the conversion process ?

  And which pages contribute the most to conversion or drop-offs ?

  Funnel analysis helps you understand what’s going on with your site visitors. Plus, it helps you see what’s wrong with your funnel.

  If you aren’t sure what’s happening with your funnel, you won’t know what to improve to grow your revenue.

  2. Improves conversions

  When you know what’s going on with your funnel, you’ll know how to improve it.

  To improve your conversion funnel, you need to close the leaks. These are areas where website visitors are falling off.

  It’s the moment the conversion is lost.

  You need to use funnel analysis to give insight into these problem areas. Once you can see where the issue is, you can patch that leak and improve the percentage of visitors who convert.

  For example, if your conversion rate on your flagship product page has plateaued and you can’t figure out how to increase conversions, implementing a funnel analysis tactic like heatmaps will show you that visitors are spending time reading your product description. Still, they’re not spending much time near your call to action.

  

  This might tell you that you need to update your description copy or adjust your button (i.e. colour, size, copy). You can increase conversions by making those changes in your funnel analysis insights.

  3. Improves the customer experience

  Funnel analysis helps you see where visitors spend their time, what elements they interact with and where they fall off.

  One of the key benefits of analysing your funnel is you’ll be able to help improve the experience your visitors have on your website.

  For example, if you have informational videos on a specific web page to educate your visitors, you might use the Media Analytics feature in your web analytics solution to find out that they’re not spending much time watching them.

  This could lead you to believe that the content itself isn’t good or relevant to them.

  But, after implementing session recordings within your funnel analysis, you see people clicking a ton near the play button. This might tell you that they’re having trouble clicking the actual button on the video player due to poor UX.

  In this scenario, you could update the UX on your web page so the videos are easy to click and watch, no matter what device someone uses.

  With more video viewers, you can provide value to your visitors instead of leaving them frustrated trying to watch your videos.

  4. Grows revenue

  This is what you’re likely after : more revenue.

  More often than not, this means you need to focus on improving your conversion rate.

  Funnel analysis helps you find those areas where visitors are exiting so you can patch those leaks up and turn more visitors into customers.

  Let’s say you have a conversion rate of 1.7%.

  You get 50,000 visitors per month.

  Your average order is $82.

  Even if you increase your conversion rate by 10% (to 1.87%) through funnel analysis, here’s the monthly difference in revenue :

  Before : $69,700
  After : $76,670

  In one year, you’ll make nearly $80,000 in additional revenue from funnel analysis alone.

  Different types of funnel analysis

  There are a few different types of funnel analysis.

  How you define success in your funnel all comes down to one of these four pillars.

  Depending on your goals, business and industry, you may want to assess the different funnel analyses at different times.

  1. Pageview funnel analysis

  Pageview funnel analysis is about understanding how well your website content is performing. 

  It helps you enhance user experience, making visitors stay longer on your site. By identifying poor performing pages (pages with high exit rates), you can pinpoint areas that need optimisation for better engagement.

  2. Conversion funnel analysis

  Next up, we’re looking at conversion funnel analysis.

  This type of funnel analysis is crucial for marketers aiming to turn website visitors into action-takers. This involves tracking and optimising conversion goals, such as signing up for newsletters, downloading ebooks, submitting forms or signing up for free trials. 

  The primary goal of conversion funnel analysis is to boost your website’s overall conversion rates.

  3. E-commerce funnel analysis

  For businesses selling products online, e-commerce funnel analysis is essential. 

  It involves measuring whether your products are being purchased and finding drop-off points in the purchasing process. 

  By optimising the e-commerce funnel, you can enhance revenue and improve the overall efficiency of your sales process.

  How to conduct funnel analysis

  Now that you understand what funnel analysis is, why it’s important, and the different types of analysis, it’s time to show you how to do it yourself.

  To get started with funnel analysis, you need to have the right web analytics solution.

  Here are the most common funnel analysis tools and methods you can use :

  1. Funnel analytics

  If you want to choose a single tool to conduct funnel analysis, it’s an all-in-one web analytics tool, like Matomo.

  

  With Matomo’s Funnel Analytics, you can dive into your whole funnel and analyse each step (and each step’s conversion rate).

  

  For instance, if you look at the example above, you can see the proceed rate at each funnel step before the conversion page.

  This means you can improve each proceed rate, to drive more traffic to your conversion page in order to increase conversion rates.

  In the above snapshot from Matomo, it shows visitors starting on the job board overview page, moving on to view specific job listings. The goal is to convert these visitors into job applicants.

  However, a significant issue arises at the job view stage, where 95% of visitors don’t proceed to job application. To increase conversions, we need to first concentrate on improving the job view page.

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  2. Heatmaps

  Heatmaps is a behaviour analytics tool that lets you see different visitor activities, including :

  • Mouse movement
  • How far down visitors scroll
  • Clicks

  You can see which elements were clicked on and which weren’t and how far people scroll down your page.

  

  A heatmap lets you see which parts of a page are getting the most attention and which parts go unnoticed by your users.

  For example, if, during your funnel analysis, you see that a lot of visitors are falling off after they land on the checkout page, then you might want to add a heatmap on your checkout page to see where and why people are exiting.

  3. Session recordings

  Want to see what individual users are doing and how they’re interacting with your site ?

  Then, you’ll want to check out session recordings.

  A session recording is a video playback of a visitor’s time on your website.

  

  It’s the most effective method to observe your visitors’ interactions with your site, eliminating uncertainty when identifying areas for funnel improvement.

  Session recordings instill confidence in your optimisation efforts by providing insights into why and where visitors may be dropping off in the funnel.

  4. A/B testing

  If you want to take the guesswork out of optimising your funnel and increasing your conversions, you need to start A/B testing.

  An A/B test is where you create two versions of a web page to determine which one converts better.

  

  For example, if your heatmaps and session recordings show that your users are dropping off near your call to action, it may be time to test a new version.

  You may find that by simply testing a different colour button, you may increase conversions by 20% or more.

  5. Form analytics

  Are you trying to get more leads to fill out forms on your site ?

  Well, Form Analytics can help you understand how your website visitors interact with your signup forms.

  You can view metrics such as starter rate, conversion rate, average hesitation time and average time spent.

  This information allows you to optimise your forms effectively, ultimately maximising your success.

  Let’s look at the performance of a form using Matomo’s Form Analytics feature below.

  

  In the Matomo example, our starter rate stands at a solid 60.1%, but there’s a significant drop to a submitter rate of 29.3%, resulting in a conversion rate of 16.3%.

  Looking closer, people are hesitating for about 16.2 seconds and taking nearly 1 minute 39 seconds on average to complete our form.

  This could indicate our form is confusing and requesting too much. Simplifying it could help increase sign-ups.

  See first-hand how Concrete CMS tripled their leads using Form Analytics in Matomo.

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  Start optimising your funnels with Matomo today

  If you want to optimise your business, you must optimise your funnels.

  Without information on what’s working and what’s not, you’ll never know if your website changes are making a difference.

  Worse yet, you could have underperforming stages in your funnel, but you won’t know unless you start looking.

  Funnel analysis changes that.

  By analysing your funnels regularly, you’ll be able to see where visitors are leaking out of your funnel. That way, you can get more visitors to convert without generating more traffic.

  If you want to improve conversions and grow revenue today, try Matomo’s Funnel Analytics feature.

  You’ll be able to see conversion rates, drop-offs, and fine-tuned details on each step of your funnel so you can turn more potential customers into paying customers.

  Additionally, Matomo comes equipped with features like heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, and form analytics to optimise your funnels with confidence.

  Try Matomo free for 21-days. No credit card required.

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• Web Analytics : The Quick Start Guide

  25 janvier 2024, par Erin

  You’ve spent ages carefully designing your website, crafting copy to encourage as many users as possible to purchase your product. 

  But they aren’t. And you don’t know why. 

  The good news is you don’t have to remain in the dark. Collecting and analysing web analytics lets you understand how your users behave on your site and why they aren’t converting. 

  But before you can do that, you need to know what those metrics and KPIs mean. That’s why this article is taking things back to basics. Below, we’ll show you which metrics to track, what they mean and how to choose the best web analytics platform. 

  What is web analytics ?

  Web analytics is the process of collecting, analysing and reporting website data to understand how users behave on your website. Web analytics platforms like Matomo collect this data by adding a code line to every site page. 

  Why is it important to track web analytics ?

  There are plenty of reasons you should start tracking web analytics, including the following :

  

  Analyse user behaviour

  Being able to analyse user behaviour is the most important reason to track website analytics. After all, you can’t improve your website’s conversion rate if you don’t know what users do on your site.

  A web analytics platform can show you how users move around your site, the links they click on and the forms they fill in. 

  Improve site experience

  Web analytics is a fantastic way to identify issues and find areas where your site could improve. You could look at your site’s exit pages, for example, and see why so many users leave your site when viewing one of these pages and what you can do to fix it.

  It can also teach you about your user’s preferences so you can improve the user experience in the future. Maybe they always click a certain type of button or prefer one page’s design over another. Whatever the case, you can use the data to make your site more user-friendly and increase conversions.

  Boost marketing efforts

  Web analytics is one of the best ways to understand your marketing efforts and learn how to improve them.

  A good platform can collect valuable data about your marketing campaigns, including :

  • Where users came from
  • What actions these users take on your site
  • Which traffic sources create the most conversions

  This information can help you decide which marketing campaigns send the best users to your site and generate the highest ROI. 

  Make informed decisions

  Ultimately, web analytics simplifies decision-making for your website and marketing efforts by relying on concrete data instead of guesswork.

  Rather than wonder why users aren’t adding products to their shopping cart or signing up for your newsletter, you can analyse how they behave and use that information to hypothesise how you can improve conversions. Web analytics will even give you the data to confirm whether you were right or wrong. 

  What are the key metrics you should track ?

  Getting your head around web analytics means knowing the most important metrics to track. Below are seven key metrics and how to track them using Matomo. 

  Traffic

  Traffic is the number of people visiting your website over a period of time. It is the lifeblood of your website since the more visits your site receives, the more revenue it stands to generate.

  However, simply having a high volume of visitors does not guarantee substantial revenue. To maximise your success, focus on attracting your ideal customers and generating quality traffic from those who are most likely to engage with your offerings.

  Ideally, you should be seeing an upward trend in traffic over time though. The longer your website has been published and the more quality and targeted content you create, the more traffic you should receive. 

  Matomo offers multiple ways to check your website’s traffic :

  • Visits log report
  • Real-time visitor map
  • Visits in real-time report

  The visits log report in Matomo is perfect if you want a granular view of your visitors.

  

  It shows you each user session and get a detailed picture of each user, including :

  • Their geographic location
  • The number of actions they took
  • How they found your site
  • The length of time they stayed
  • Their device type
  • What browser they are using
  • The keyword they used to find your site

  Traffic sources

  Traffic sources show how users access your website. They can enter via a range of traffic sources, including search engines, email and direct visits, for instance.

  Matomo has five default traffic source types :

  • Search engine – visitors from search platforms (like Google, Bing, etc.)
  • Direct traffic – individuals who directly type your website’s URL into their browser or have it bookmarked, bypassing search engines or external links
  • Websites – visits from other external sites
  • Campaigns – traffic resulting from specific marketing initiatives (like a newsletter or ad campaign, for instance)
  • Social networks  – visitors who access your website through various social media platforms (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. etc.)

  But each of these can be broken into more granular sources. Take organic traffic from search engines, for example :

  

  Matomo tracks visits from each search engine, showing you how many visits you had in total, how many actions those visitors took, and the average amount of time those visitors spent on your site. 

  You can even integrate Google, Bing and Yahoo search consoles to monitor keyword performance and enhance your search engine optimisation efforts.

  Pageviews

  Whenever a browser loads a page, your web analytics tool records a pageview. This term, pageview, represents the count of unique times a page on your website is loaded.

  You can track pageviews in Matomo by opening the Pages tab in the Behaviour section of the main navigation. 

  

  You can quickly see your site’s most visited pages in this report in Matomo. 

  Be careful of deriving too much meaning from pageviews. Just because a page has lots of views, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s quality or valuable. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the page might be confusing, so users have to keep revisiting it to understand the content. Second, it could be the default page most visitors land on when they enter your site, like the homepage. 

  While pageviews offer insights, it’s important to dig deeper into user behaviour and other metrics to truly gauge a page’s importance and impact.

  Average time on page

  Time on page is the amount of time users spend on the page on average. You can see average time on page in Matomo’s page analytics report.

  A low time on page score isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Users will naturally spend less time on gateway pages and checkout pages. A short time spent on checkout pages, especially if users are successfully completing their transactions, indicates that the checkout process is easy and seamless.

  Conversely, a longer time on blog posts is a positive indicator. It suggests that readers are genuinely engaged with the content.

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  Returning visitors

  Returning visitors measures the number of people who visit your site more than once. It can be expressed as a number or a percentage. 

  While some analytics tools only show returning visitors as a percentage, Matomo lets you learn more about each of them in the Visitor profile report. 

  

  This report offers a full summary of a user’s previous actions, including :

  • How many times they’ve visited your site
  • The pages they viewed on each visit
  • Where they visited from
  • The devices they used
  • How quickly pages loaded

  When people keep coming back to a website, it’s usually a positive sign and means they like the service, content or products. But, it depends on the type of website. If it’s the kind of site where people make one-off purchases, the focus might not be on getting visitors to return. For a site like this, a high number of returning visitors could indicate that the website is confusing or difficult to use. 

  It’s all about the context – different websites have different goals, and it’s important to keep this in mind when analysing your site.

  Conversions

  A conversion is when a user takes a desired action on your website. This could be :

  • Making a purchase
  • Subscribing to your newsletter
  • Signing up for a webinar

  You can track virtually any action as a conversion in Matomo by setting goals and analysing the goals report.

  

  As you can see in the screenshot above, Matomo shows your conversions plotted over time. You can also see your conversion rate to get a complete picture and assign a value to each conversion to calculate how much revenue each conversion generates. 

  Bounce rate

  A visitor bounces when they leave your website without taking an action or visiting another page. 

  Typically, you want bounce rate to be low because it means people are engaged with your site and more likely to convert. However, in some cases, a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily bad. It might mean that visitors found what they needed on the first page and didn’t feel the need to look further. 

  The impact of bounce rate depends on your website’s purpose and goals.

  You can view your website’s bounce rate using Matomo’s page analytics report — the same report that shows pageviews.

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  Web analytics best practices

  You should follow several best practices to get the most from website analytics data. 

  Choose metrics that align with your goals

  Only some metrics your analytics platform tracks will be relevant to your business. So don’t waste time analysing all of them.

  Instead, focus on the ones that matter most to your business. A marketer for an e-commerce store, for example, might focus on conversion-related metrics like conversion rate and total number of transactions. They might also want to look at campaign-related metrics, like traffic sources and bounce rates, so they can optimise paid ad campaigns accordingly. 

  A marketer looking to improve their site’s SEO, on the other hand, will want to track SEO web analytics like bounce rate and broken links.

  Add context to your data

  Don’t take your data at face value. There could be dozens of factors that impact how visitors access and use your site — many of which are outside your control. 

  For example, you may think an update to your site has sent your conversions crashing when, in reality, a Google algorithm update has negatively impacted your search traffic.

  Adding annotations within Matomo can provide invaluable context to your data. These annotations can be used to highlight specific events, changes or external factors that might influence your website metrics.

  

  By documenting significant occurrences, such as website updates, marketing campaigns or algorithm changes, you create a timeline that helps explain fluctuations in your data.

  Go further with advanced web analytics features

  It’s clear that a web analytics platform is a necessary tool to understand your website’s performance.

  However, if you want greater confidence in decision-making, quicker insights and better use of budget and resources, you need an advanced solution with behavioural analytics features like heatmaps, A/B testing and session recordings. 

  Most web analytics solutions don’t offer these advanced features, but Matomo does, so we’ll be showcasing Matomo’s behavioural analytics features.

  Now, if you don’t have a Matomo account, you can try it free for 21-days to see if it’s the right tool for you.

  

  A heatmap, like the example above, makes it easy to discover where your users pay attention, which part of your site they have problems with, and how they convert. It adds a layer of qualitative data to the facts offered by your web analytics tool.

  Similarly, session recordings will offer you real-time playbacks of user interactions, helping you understand their navigation patterns, identify pain points and gain insights into the user experience.

  Then you can run experiments bu using A/B testing to compare different versions of your website or specific elements, allowing you to make informed decisions based on actual user preferences and behaviour. For instance, you can compare different headlines, images, page layouts or call-to-action buttons to see which resonates better with your audience. 

  Together, these advanced features will give you the confidence to optimise your website, improve user satisfaction and make data-driven decisions that positively impact your business.

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  How to choose a web analytics tool

  A web analytics tool is the best way to track the above metrics. Choose the best one for your company by following the steps below. 

  Look for the right features

  Most popular web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, will offer the same core features like tracking website traffic, monitoring conversions and generating reports. 

  But it’s the added features that set great tools apart. Do you need specific tools to measure the performance of your e-commerce store, for example ? What about paid ad performance, A/B testing or form analytics ?

  By understanding exactly what you need from an analytics platform, you can make an informed choice. 

  Think about data accuracy

  Data accuracy is one of the biggest issues with analytics tools. Many users block cookies or opt out of tracking, making it difficult to get a clear picture of user behaviour — and meaning that you have to think about how your user data will be collected with your chosen platform.

  Google Analytics, for instance, uses data sampling to make assumptions about traffic levels rather than relying on accurate data. This can lead to inaccurate reports and false conclusions. 

  It’s why Matomo doesn’t use data sampling and provides 100% accurate data. 

  Understand how you’ll deal with data privacy

  Data privacy is another big concern for analytics users. Several major analytics platforms aren’t compatible with regional data privacy laws like GDPR, which can impact your ability to collect data in these regions. 

  It’s why many companies trust privacy-focused analytics tools that abide by regulations without impacting your ability to collect data. Matomo is a market leader in this respect and is one of the few web analytics tools that the Centre for Data Privacy Protection in France has said is exempt from tracking consent requirements.

  Many government agencies across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, including organisations like the United Nations and European Commission, rely on Matomo for web analytics.

  Conclusion

  Web analytics is a powerful tool that helps you better understand your users, improve your site’s performance and boost your marketing efforts. 

  If you want a platform that offers advanced features, 100% accurate data and protects your users’ privacy, then look no further than Matomo. 

  Try Matomo free for 21 days, no credit card required. 

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