How Web Analytics Can Help You Understand Your Customers

Bounce rates. Page views. Acquisition. New vs. returning visitors. When it comes to web analytics, which metrics are the most important?

When used collectively and strategically, all of them matter, says web analytics expert Krista Park who teaches UVM’s Online Analytics Certificate.

“It’s about understanding analytics as a whole,” says Park, Customer Experience Analytics Manager at Mobiquity Inc.,  “Analytics are only one piece of the larger puzzle. You use web analytics to inform. But just because your web numbers are going up doesn’t mean things are going the way you want for your company. You need to think about the data strategically.”

The online, self-paced course offers a deep dive into Google Analytics and interpreting web traffic data. It’s designed for digital marketers, data analysts, small business owners, and non-profit marketing professionals looking to deepen their understanding of how to identify and use data to support their campaign planning and performance. It will also show how to leverage data as a way to better understand how a company’s website is being used—by whom and in what ways—for better reporting.

“We’ll look into how the process of selecting key data works, evaluating data, presenting it effectively, and communicating findings and recommended actions—based on the data—to achieve a business’s objectives,” Park says. “The course will help participants more efficiently and effectively evaluate their business’s performance and create actionable insights.”

Those actionable insights will then be used to achieve their business objectives, whether it’s growth in a particular area, stemming a loss, or working to achieve parity with their competitors, Park says.

UVM’s Online Analytics Certificate

The UVM course will help prepare participants for the Google Analytics certification exam. Participants will also learn:

• Develop a solid understanding of the basic concepts and techniques you will encounter as a practitioner in the web analytics field
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and discuss how they are chosen and implemented
• Examine segmentation with strategies for how to categorize website visitors
• Plan and assess website business strategies using web analytics
• Understand the practice of web analytics and how Google Analytics is used as a tool in this field
• Describe the basic concepts behind Google Analytics including metrics, dimensions, and goal-tracking
• Set up a Google Analytics account and the tracking code that pulls data from websites and applications
• Understand organizational goals for analytics, visitors, goals, and goal values
• Analyze website traffic reports and compare data for marketing and sales purposes
• Describe the differences between dimensions and metrics and how they are used to analyze web traffic
• Create Google Analytics’ Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions reports and translate data from those reports into an actionable plan
• Analyze average session duration, bounce rate, pages per session, page views, and how each plays a role in a digital measurement plan
• Understand views, filters, and segmentations and how they work in digital analytics
• Define conversion rate and the many factors that contribute to it
• Identify the components of a digital marketing campaign and the role each component plays in conversion rate optimization
• Identify strategies for enhancing conversion rates
• Demonstrate successful application of the concepts learned to real-world scenarios through the Mimic Analytics Simulation

Admission is rolling for the Online Analytics Certificate, so students can join at any time. Once registered for the course, students have 90 days to complete the three modules to obtain the certificate.