Are you analyzing your website or just tracking it?

Modern website analytics leverages event data to allow for in-depth analysis of website performance and user behavior. Modern analytics goes beyond traditional website-tracking metrics—like page views, sessions, and bounce rates—to bring a more granular level of user behavior measurement for a better understanding of both what is happening on your website and why.

For digital companies, your website is your storefront. And like any storefront, it needs to draw people in. Your website is often one of the first interactions that leads will have with your company, and a poor experience will drive those leads away. Eighty-eight percent of online consumers say they are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience. 

But not everyone agrees on how to measure website performance, how to improve it, or even what to track. One thing is for sure, though—monitoring page views and visitors will only get you so far. To improve on-site user experience and optimize your website performance, you need to leverage modern web analytics, an approach that goes deeper to give you in-depth, actionable insights. 

Website analytics, or web analytics, is the process of analyzing your website’s performance by tracking user behaviors, or events, like page views, button clicks, and purchases. Those events can help calculate things like session time, bounce rate, or average value for visitors, and they can be enriched by more data like traffic sources to understand how they arrived at your site. All of these metrics (and more) give you valuable insights into how visitors interact with your website and allow you to optimize your website’s performance based on the data you collect.

First-gen web analytics (also called web tracking platforms) have measured page views and how long users were on your website, usually using third-party cookies, but they didn’t let you dig deeper. Without more information on what visitors are doing on your site, you can only see some picture of whether a page is underperforming, but you can’t easily investigate much of why it is happening—or how to fix it.

Modern web analytics platforms use event tracking to provide a full view of user behavior. With event tracking, you can record more—and more granular—user actions like button clicks, item views, media interactions, or text field inputs which allow true analysis of how and why those actions take place.

With all of that data combined, you can get a clearer understanding of how actions among users on your website tie together. With the right tools and processes in place, you can track website visitor data, use it to understand your audience, and analyze acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics. This allows you to build hypotheses on how to improve the website, test those hypotheses, and make changes that will improve performance. 

When we think of measuring website performance, we often think first of the things that we can measure in numbers—anything that we can add to a website performance dashboard and track over time.

But the most powerful analysis combines quantitative data with qualitative research. Qualitative website research encompasses everything you can’t measure in metrics, like visual behavior insights, which show you how real people interact with your website. Standalone qualitative analysis is very useful, but it isn’t a viable solution at scale. 

For powerful analysis, you need tools like Mixpanel, which offers Session Replay alongside quantitative data. You can use quantitative analysis to spot broader trends or unusual patterns in your data, zoom in on individual sessions that are part of a larger pattern, and watch what is actually happening with your users. 

Now that we’ve talked about the difference between first-gen and modern web analytics, let’s look at a couple of examples of what modern web analytics can do.

Luxury home textile retailer Boll & Branch makes a significant portion of sales through their ecommerce website. The company needed to understand how users were interacting with their website and use that information to drive improvements. 

Using web analytics, Boll & Branch discovered interesting search patterns: They realized that users were often searching for related products immediately after being on a page with similar merchandise. They used these insights (and others) to rework their product pages and overall website design, which helped increase add-to-cart rate and conversion rate.  

When website builder GoDaddy was releasing a big, new product for its professional customers, it needed a way to track and analyze data in real-time, at scale, across the platform’s 18 million users to see how it was being adopted. They used web analytics to create user cohorts to test different layouts and prominence of the new product's features on their website ahead of launching them in the GoDaddy app. Processes like these help them catch opportunities to improve website experience quickly and make continuous changes to optimize performance.

Digital companies need to understand how users interact with their websites, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Companies rely on all kinds of data to reach company goals. The problem is that different teams are often using different tools and pulling that data from different sources. This leads to discrepancies, errors, and missed opportunities. 

No company is immune: It happened to us here at Mixpanel. We realized that despite healthy acquisition numbers in Google Analytics, conversions from those signups to paying customers were low. The problem we couldn’t see was that users coming from certain acquisition channels weren’t converting. Because we were using different data sources (GA for marketing analytics and Mixpanel for product analytics), our marketing and product teams weren’t working in sync. 

With connected marketing analytics, website analytics, and product analytics tied to a single data source, we would have seen that problem much sooner. 

That realization is a big part of the reason we believe in full user-journey analytics. We believe that web, product, marketing, and business analytics should all be connected within a single platform. 

Now, we use Warehouse Connectors to apply self-serve analytics to all of the company data in our warehouse, including marketing data, product data, and revenue data, giving everyone a full picture of the user behavior across the entire funnel. Combining all of this data and analysis in a single place tears down silos and gives all of our teams a shared source of truth to work from. 

The right website analytics platform is an important tool in your analytics arsenal: It can help you investigate on-site user behavior and use that data to make changes that will drive performance. Powerful, modern web analytics platforms will allow you to bring together quantitative and qualitative website data and combine it with other company data to get powerful, full user journey insights that can fuel business decisions. 

Perhaps most importantly, reaching for a modern and self-serve web analytics tool like Mixpanel can democratize access to data and empower everyone in your organization to run powerful analysis and share their findings.