Data Visualization For Webmasters
Running a website, e-commerce or a blog, is a lot to manage. Challenges like:
- Need for fresh and updated content
- Decrease bounce rate
- Site optimization
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social Media marketing, etc.,
These are enough to subdue the spirits with which we start our websites. But after giving a lot to our online home, we expect, and deserve:
- Good ROI
- Followers, and
- Global audience (if possible).
While the first one broadly depends on the last two, they themselves depend upon overcoming the above mentioned challenges. And to make that happen, you need to decide and implement on a well researched and proven digital marketing strategy. And if you have been running a website for some time, chances are you already have a good deal of idea on how to do that.
So, if you have the resources and network to gather such data, what else do you need before you start jumping upon conclusions? The answer is “A better way visualize and understand that data”.
Visualize before you decide: Data visualization in Digital Marketing
When you are all set with what kind of digital marketing strategy to go for, you should brace yourself for huge data that will soon start to flood your screens. And that’s a good sign! More the data, more options you have to experiment with. But problems arise as soon you have to burden yourself with all the “records” of:
- Keywords and organic search results
- Social media channels and their metrics
- Search ranking by different engines
- Sources for incoming traffic
- Leads generated and converted for separate campaigns, etc.
Such kind of data, along with its distinct nature, poses two problems:
- Time consumption
- You have to ask a “tech-guy” for help.
While there is nothing wrong in asking for help from someone who is an expert, but this only lengthens your chain of command. Means, your decisions will depend upon the understanding and knowledge of the person who you load with the responsibility of projecting the numbers to you. That’s why it becomes more important to visualize data in a way that not only is easily understandable, but is also arranged in a manner that helps you in finding co-relations and patterns among other variables too. And that’s why you need to opt for data visualization that only makes it simpler for you to understand what the numbers speak. Without making them to whisper the results to others first.
Benefits of Data Visualization in when Managing Your Website
Data visualization with today’s simple and easy-to-use BI(Business Intelligence) tools( like Tableau, Power bi, Google Data Studio), is simply putting your numbers in form of graphs and figures. So you don’t need to consult big Statistics manuals in order to understand what needs to be done to rev-up your marketing strategy. That too from anywhere, at anytime! And here is what you start receiving once you switch to data visualization, with a web-analytic dashboard
1. A better insight into your SEO
SEO is not tough, but definitely a process that takes enough time. Keywords, anchor texts, back links, images, and internal links. Putting them together is a task on its own. And then reviewing your entire blog manually to check that correct “density” of everything only bitters the experience. So with so many factors to look at, we have to have a single-point-view that connects them all, while giving us a report on what factors performed well for us, and which didn’t. And SEO dashboards are just the thing for that.
2. Comparing becomes fun
Comparing among options sometimes gives us headache. And when the competition is “that close”, it only adds to our troubles. But it looks like companies were attentive to our problems. So not only they developed tools that make comparison easier, but also fun to work with. Like this one, developed by Google.
3. Reporting isn’t about explaining Anymore
If you need to report on your website’s performance on periodic basis to your team, then dashboards are fun. For now you don’t need to explain them anything, and the team can rather use that team in fruitful discussions.
4. A better understanding of your users
You simply can’t sit and go through your website’s social media walls, of Youtube, Facebook, or Twitter, reading every other comment. This process of knowing what users want is not only redundant, but sometimes depressing too; given the nature of comments a webmaster gets from users spread worldwide. That’s why you can choose to have sentimental analytic dashboard. A sentimental analytics dashboard helps you to put a filter on comments to help you filter out the ones that can truly be of any importance. Further, comments can be categorized as positive, negative, or neutral ones.
5. Improved monitoring of key metrics
Key metrics like:
- Page views
- Percentage of new versus returning visitors
- Percentage of referral traffic
- Website visitors
These are important to understand to deliver a improved and better tailored content to your users. A web-analytic dashboard helps you in understanding your strong and weak areas in visual manner.
Summing it Up
With smartphones populating almost every hand and pockets, web traffic is now more than ever. And this traffic, the users, is now more impatient than ever. Surfing web, jumping pages, exploring millions of options. That’s what they do, continuously, till they find what they want of web. And to be ahead of all your competitors, you need to be that web page that captures their attention. That’s why you need to evolve, as a webmaster, to understand the interests and user-experience to help you make and market better content than ever. That’s sure needs time. So you should make sure that half of your precious time isn’t consumed by unnecessary data arrangements. And the other half in understanding what that data means.