Website Analytics Reviews

Reviewing an existing website’s analytics is another way to gain insight into its effectiveness.

We recommend using Google Analytics  to track and record website analytics and metrics. Your Google Analytics account’s home page automatically shows several traffic metrics.

Looking through your analytics can help you assess what content is essential to keep (often what’s being viewed the most) and what’s probably okay to cut (often pages that see next-to-no visits).

Determine Most Viewed Pages

To determine what pages are being viewed the most, you will want to look at pages with top views. This should help reveal what visitors most want to see.

Because the university is cyclical in nature, it is helpful to look at traffic across a full calendar year. In addition to looking at pages that have the most views overall, you can also look for pages that get large spikes in views at certain times of the year. This can help uncover certain pages that are very popular, but only within a specific window of time.

For example, pages that detail application instructions may get proportionally very high views during a few months, but then next-to-no views the rest of the year. These pages are critically important, but only looking at pages that get the highest total views for the year wouldn’t reveal that.

Learn more about pageviews in GA4

Determine Least Viewed Pages

Using the same tool, you can sort to show pages with the least amount of views. Doing so may reveal pages you had forgotten exist, or perhaps even pages that have important content that are (apparently) difficult to find.

After reviewing these least-viewed pages, you can decide if those pages can be removed from the site entirely, or if their information needs to be reformatted or perhaps even moved to a different page to increase findability.

Identify Pages With High Engagement Rate

Looking at pages with a high engagement rate can help you identify helpful pages. A high engagement rate typically indicates that users are spending more time on that page and consuming that information, instead of quickly clicking away.

You can also compare pages with high engagement rate to those with a high (or low) amount of page views. Pages with a high view count should ideally have a high engagement rate to match, but by comparing you will also find some pages with low views but engaged users and vice versa.

Learn more about engagement rates in GA4

Review Where Your Site Traffic Is Coming From

Another measure of effectiveness you can look at through website analytics is referrals. A referral is the location from which people came to your site. For example, if a user performed a Google search and then came to your site through one of the results,  the referral would be “organic search”.

Looking at referrals can help you see how effective your whole digital marketing infrastructure is. You can see if your social media or email campaigns are driving users to your site.

Learn more about referral tracking in GA4

Review User Behavior

Microsoft Clarity  is a website analytics tool that allows you to see exactly how users behave once they have accessed your site. Clarity provides heat maps, user journey videos, and click analysis to better help you address content layout. Chances are, if a page is underperforming on one or more web analytics tools, Clarity will be able to show you where users lose focus on your site.

Using Clarity, you can answer questions such as:

• What areas of your webpages do users click on most?
• Where is the average 50% fold? (the place on a page where 50% of users have dropped off or left the page)
• Does your site experience a large amount of “rage clicks”?