How Website Analytics and Engagement Work Together

To make your website perform its best, you need to understand how well it’s supporting your marketing goals and what happens when people visit. Monitoring website analytics and website engagement provides this insight. A website’s analytics report tells you how your website is performing, while website engagement data adds to what you know about each website visitor.

When you harness website analytics and website engagement data, you’ll see what’s happening on both a big picture and an individual level. This will help you make website enhancements, create personalized content, and target people effectively.

Improve your website’s success by learning more about how these tools work together.

Understand website analytics

Website marketing analytics monitor the performance of pages on your website, so you know what is—and isn’t—working.

When you build your website in Mailchimp, you’ll find data like total visits, views, clicks, and subscribes in your website report. To view unique visits and conversion rates, be sure Track with Mailchimp is turned on.

To get even more in-depth insights, connect your website to Google Analytics. Using this tool, you can more closely see how your visitors engage, including how much time they spend on various pages, the path they take to get to your website, how they move around your website once they arrive, and what causes them to “bounce off” or leave.

With all of this information, you’ll begin to understand which pages of your website generate the most visits and drive conversions. You’ll also learn where your website is falling short, so that you can make adjustments. Here are a few examples of how to apply this insight.

• A tax firm promoting the download of a “10 Tips for Tax Season” e-book with paid social advertising could look at the number of unique first-time visitors to the website from the ads. If the numbers are high, they know the ads resonated with their audience. If they’re low, it’s a sign the approach needs retooling.
• A jewelry e-commerce business can review where visitors click on a landing page to gain insight about what draws their audience’s attention. If people are drawn to buttons promoting new designs, but ignore banners about sales, this could indicate the target is more style than price driven.
• When users visit a page for information about a new app, and then quickly navigate away from your website without looking at other pages or downloading the app, this is a sign something is wrong. More links to related content, or a better explanation of the app’s benefits, could improve conversion.

Understand website engagement

Website engagement data shows you who your audience is and what they want. It tells you when they’re interested in learning about your product or service or in making a purchase.

This data is collected and stored on your website visitor's contact profile in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This allows you to get a 360-degree view of your audience and to create segments based on how people engage with your site, enabling you to easily send personalized campaigns.

Detailed website engagement data helps you improve your digital demand generation strategy in a variety of ways.

• If someone visits a page about hot yoga on a health club website, they’re a good prospect for retargeting ads promoting upcoming classes.
• Professionals researching virtual event platforms might welcome an email invitation to a webinar explaining how the platform works, or a sample virtual event where they can experience the platform for themselves.
• People looking for seasonal services like lawn care could be retargeted with postcards offering a discount when they sign up for an introductory visit on a customized landing page.
• Knowing a visitor’s journey through a website before they convert—what pages they visit and in what order—could help a spa see which services are of interest to a client. This could give insight into what additional services could be upsold after their initial appointment.
• Local visitors could be segmented based on where they initially visited your website, and that data could be used for targeted ads. If people are coming in from the Boston area, encourage them to visit a nearby store.

Combine engagement and analytics

Both analytics and engagement are essential to managing a successful website. Analytics inform you about how well your website is working overall to help you achieve your business goals. When combined with engagement data, you can use what you know about individual interests to build and nurture relationships with your audience on their terms.

With a full view of your website analytics and engagement, you won’t miss any opportunities to deliver personalized messaging. Plus, data from website reporting helps you monitor traffic, including how people arrive on different pages on your website. This will help you determine which marketing efforts are (or aren’t) performing well.

As you begin to analyze your website behavior data, remember that there are several key steps to keep in mind.

• Your analytics should always inform the next step in your marketing action. Leverage Track with Mailchimp so you can see what your audience is doing when they get to your website, what engages them, and where you have room for improvement.
• Knowing your website activity will help you send hyper-personalized email follow-ups to your visitors. Use this knowledge to make your email messaging relevant and useful to your recipients.
• Always make sure that your website is compliant with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and any other regulations that can impact your business. In Mailchimp’s website builder, you can easily create cookie notification bars that will keep you in compliance with CCPA and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Knowledge is power

Combining your analytics and engagement data provides insight you can use to build on what’s working now and to tweak what needs improvement. When you know what your audience is really looking for and how they want to access information, you can create personalized, targeted marketing that’s relevant to them and productive for you.