chapter twelve

12 Analytics: Building an audience

 

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 SEO helps you attract an initial audience, website analytics help you build and retain your audience. You’ll want to know 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, and various additional data you can use to improve your site’s appeal and retention rate.

12.1 The Purchase Funnel

Marketers use the term 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:

12.1.1 AI enters the picture

12.2 Understanding the elements of analytics

12.2.1 Page views

12.2.2 Unique visitors

12.2.3 Bounce rate

12.2.4 Average Session Duration

12.2.5 Conversion Rates

12.2.6 Click Path

12.3 Tracking Options

12.3.1 The Value of Tracking

12.3.2 Analytics Via AI

12.4 Four Excellent Analytics Plugins

12.4.1 MonsterInsights

12.4.2 Site Kit vs. MonsterInsights

12.4.3 Crazy Egg

12.5 AI as site critic

12.5.1 What are AI agents?

12.6 Two AI heads are better than one

12.6.1 Getting better AI responses

12.7 Summary