This chapter covers
- Understanding the purchase funnel
- Exploring the elements of analytics
- Taking advantage of tracking options
- Seeing how AI impacts analytics systems
- Surveying the four best analytics plugins
- Using Crazy Egg’s excellent maps
- Asking AI to critique your site
Where search engine optimization (SEO) helps you attract an initial audience, website analytics help you build and retain your audience. You’ll want to use analytic data to see how your visitors behave during their stay:
- Where they came from
- How they navigate through your pages
- Where they pause
- Where in the site they are when they leave
- How to improve your site’s appeal and retention rate
12.1 The purchase funnel
Marketers use the phrase purchase funnel. It’s like a tunnel, but it keeps getting narrower and narrower until there’s only one way out. (The more polite term is purchasing journey.) This funnel has three stages: