web analytics is all about using the data you can collect from your website to give you insights about your business.
There are lots of web analytics tools and they can do a variety of things. Web analytics helps you by providing data.
A “metric” is basically anything you can count. “Unique Visitors” “Time Spent On Site” how much money you’re making or how many of a certain product you’re selling.
you can track the number of times someone looked at a blog post or the amount of time they spent on it. All of these things are “metrics.”
you’ll generally analyze your metrics by using what are called “dimensions.”
Let’s say someone places an order, downloads driving directions to your shop, fills out a contact form, or does something else that you want them to do when they’re visiting your site. This is known as a “conversion.”
Web analytics tools can tell you if the “conversion rate”, or the amount of people that visit and then convert on one of your goals, changes based on where they came from, whether they’d been there before, or even the type of device they’re using.
If you know which devices your site is working best and worst on, you can identify specific areas of strength to build on and areas you’ll need to improve. in that example we were comparing “metrics” of conversions or conversion rates, but
The “device” data we’re collecting is called a “dimension,”
Generally, a dimension is any kind of data you can use to describe something you’re tracking with words.
Dimensions include things like the device type, what browsers visitors use, their geographic locations, etc
By taking your metrics and “slicing” them with dimensions, you can find answers to very specific, detailed business questions, such as: “which devices are people finding it easiest to convert on the goals of my website?”
Take your “Visitors” metric and break that down by an “Hour of Day” dimension.
finding out which marketing campaigns are making the most sales? Take your “Conversions” metric, and break it down by a “Campaign” dimension.
Look into your web analytics reports, you’ll be able to see all the metrics and dimensions being tracked, and you can combine them and slice and dice them to answer the questions you care most about.