Introduction
Analytics is a process that can be applied to various types of data, including website traffic, customer behavior, sales data, social media engagement, and more. You may have some challenges, like not knowing who’s visiting your website and what they’re doing on your website.
You may be paying for ads, but not seeing anybody or enough people to buy your services. These are all good questions that you can answer with analytics. Collecting data and measuring website metrics can provide valuable insights into student engagement, performance, and course effectiveness.
Challenges online course teachers may encounter if they don’t track analytics on their teacher websites:
- Without tracking analytics, it can be challenging to know whether students are actively engaging with the course content or not.
- Without analytics information, it can be challenging for teachers to identify areas for improvement or to tailor their approach to meet student needs.
- It can lead to challenges in determining whether the course is meeting its learning objectives or whether changes need to be made.
- Challenge in providing the right type of support at the right time can lead to frustration and disengagement among struggling students.
- It can be challenging to secure ongoing support and resources for the course.
In this lesson, we’re going to learn about analytics for your teacher’s websites so that you can learn about your traffic and know what people are doing on your website, as well as what people are not doing on your website.
Video Lesson – How To Track Your Business Growth
What Are Analytics?
Analytics refers to the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data in order to gain insights and make informed decisions. Analytics counts and provides reports of activities on your website. For example, how many people visit your website each month? Analytics are sometimes called metrics, statistics, or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
You can have various metrics that are your KPIs, and various stats that you’re tracking every month to see how your business is growing. These are some of the words that different people use for stats, metrics, and KPIs. We’re going to get into analytics. There are lots of different values, and some of them could be your Key Performance Indicators.
Analytics are counting very specific events that happen on your website and aggregating them into a database. Later, you can learn about:
- How many people showed up today?
- How many people showed up last month?
- How many people clicked on this thing?
Those are all different kinds of metrics that you’ll be able to know once you have analytics installed. The most popular analytics platform is called Google Analytics.
Why Track Analytics?
Regardless of what analytics package or metrics you’re using, let’s just give you a primer on what is analytics. Why would you want them for your teacher websites and other services like your community or courses so that you can see what is happening on your properties?
Business Health
It lets you know how many visitors are coming to your property every single month, day, and hour. Not only will you know the health of your business. You will know what people are specifically doing on your website that might help those visitors ultimately become customers.
Knowing high-level business health like having a thousand people this month, that’s great and 150 of them looked at my services page to see how I can help them.
What Is Working
Working Analytics lets you know which kinds of content you might have, maybe content on your blog or certain words on landing pages that resonate with your customers.
From an ads point of view, what are the different ads that are getting clicked on and making it to your webpage? For instance, as an online music teacher, which ads are students clicking on that takes them to your webpage?
Social sharing lets you know what types of content they’re sharing and which of those social websites are people clicking on that come back to your webpage.
Your lead magnet, are people signing up or are they not signing up? Is it the popup? Is it the sidebar? Is it at the bottom of reading a long blog article that they’re ultimately signing up to get tips or to get your pdf, and then ultimately booking links?
You might have Calendly, ‘send me a message,’ ‘let’s have a discovery call,’ ‘send me an email,’ and ‘call me.’ Are those different pages and services working?, are they getting visitors right up to that specific page that says, ‘Hey, schedule a time now to talk’? Or are they not even making it to that booking page? You need to know all these different things.
What To Change
Analytics also gives you insight into what to change, what’s not working, what experiment you should try, for example, content on your homepage; Is it just too busy? Do you have your blog there? Should you not have your blog there? What’s the main message of SEO?
What do you have configured for your metadata on each of the various important pages? Indexing? Do you have certain key content on your website that’s there, but Google doesn’t know about it, so when people search, It’s not in the search results because certain pages may not have been added?
What does your menu look like? Do you have the key items? Do you have the right information, and architecture in the right hierarchy order? Do you go deep with three levels on your menu or just one or two items on your main menu?
Button text or links; What is the anchor text that you have on your buttons? Are they generic? Can you change the words instead of ‘order now,’ or ‘click to learn more.’ These are different things that you can do to improve your results when visitors interact on your page or sales page.
You’ll want to tweak your checkout. Maybe your checkout is three or four steps and with one click they can put in their credit card and order your service. There’s a variety of different things. Do you have lots of fields? Are people making it to your checkout page, but for whatever reason, they’re not buying?
Maybe your SSL certificate is out or some other issue, but with analytics and metrics, you’ll know where people are going and where they’re stopping, dropping, and bouncing off your website.
Important Site Metrics
Let’s dig into some of the more popular metrics that people are watching week to week, month to month for their online courses or their teacher websites.
Impressions
How many people saw your website in their search results? They searched for something and they saw your website was there on the list. Maybe page one, page two, or three. It was there and they scrolled through it. For whatever reason, they didn’t click on it.
Maybe they didn’t like the title or it wasn’t for them, but how many impressions are you getting?
Unique Visitors
How many people actually clicked or typed your website and went directly to your website? How many actual unique people, not the same person that went in and out and in and out, but unique visitors across the world that saw something or heard about it and clicked on it and went to a page on your website?
These are your unique visitors and it’s very important.
Traffic Sources
Where did they find you? did they know about your company and they typed it into the browser and clicked enter, or did they search for something, some of your keywords that you offer with your teacher website, and they ultimately found you on search results?
Good job on SEO they clicked on it and they went to one or more of your pages. So if they use SEO, that would be called organic traffic.
Was it a referral? For example, maybe they were on social media, on Twitter and they saw something about your site or a blog very specific to your niche, and they saw something that you said there and they liked what you said.
Those are referral links that another website had a link to your website and people clicked over there and they landed on your website.
Finally, another traffic source is a paid source. This is like advertising, so you paid for it, clicked on the ad and they went directly to a specific page on your website. Could be your homepage, but a landing page is recommended specifically for whatever it is that ad was selling.
Traffic sources are good to know, and it’s great to look at as a pie graph. Where’s my traffic coming from? And what ratios?
Session Duration
When people go to your website, how long are they staying there? Are they gone within two seconds? Are they hitting the back button on the browser? Or are they staying there? Do they like looking around? Are they curious? Is it the right fit for them? Are your visitors visiting you and staying on your website?
Think of this as an engagement. They found something that they’re interested in, they’re clicking around, and they’re reading the blog article. They might be reading your glossary or watching a video or learning more about you, and maybe they’ll read one or two, or three blog articles.
This is all about you speaking in their terms. Are you really helping them? Are you removing a pain? Are you providing your visitors with benefits?
Which Pages
Which pages are people visiting on your website? Is it all about the homepage? Are there very specific pages? Is it your main lead magnet, categories page, services, blog, or different things?
What pages are they visiting and which ones are the most popular? It might not just be direct links in your main menu or your homepage.
It might be that checkout page or that signup form or maybe for some reason, some pages are erroring out so you need to know which pages are being viewed and whether they’re good or bad so that you can redirect traffic.
So, now you know what analytics are. They’re data key events for your website. The events are usually that a page was looked at.
It’s super important for your business health and it lets you, as a business owner and lead, teacher, and coach, know what you should change so that you can improve your metrics month over.
How Analytics Are Collected
Let’s go into an example and talk about how analytics are collected.
Request Content
Firstly, a visitor may have wanted a piece of content from your website. Maybe they’re interested in your blog or a certain page.
They’re on their browser, under a tablet, or on their computer, and their device is talking to your web server. It’s saying, ‘hi, can I please view the blog pages ABC? And by the way, I’m at address 123.’
Remember, the internet works with addresses. Just like houses that have a home address, every device has an internet address and an IP address. The visitor uses their tablet on your website and they request a page, the server, or your web server.
Serve Content
As an example, maybe WordPress says, ‘oh, this user wants this page, first of all, do I have the page’? ‘Yeah. Great. I do have the page.’ Then every time a request is made, it sends a message to your website. For example, Google Analytics; ‘Hey, Google Analytics, this user from Address 123 wants page ABC. Letting you know so you can log it on your database.’
Record Event
Later, you might ask about how many people came to this page or how many people visited my website. Google Analytics will notify the server about every request that comes into your web server, by saying, ‘hey, log out of an event, record this transaction, where a user from this address needed this thing.’
It lets Google Analytics know, and then it returns whatever it is that your customer needs. In this case, it returns the HTML for page ABC and your customer. They just keep requesting pages as they’re clicking.
Every time they request a page from your web server, it notifies Google Analytics. ‘Hey, somebody just asked for this, track it real quick. I don’t need to know the details, but just log this event and then it returns to results so that the visitor could be happy and without waiting too long.’
That’s how analytics generally, underneath all the systems, talk to each other. From your point of view, they let you track every single client request, and later you can slice and dice all that data.
Frequently Asked Questions About Analytics for Teacher Websites?
Summary – Analytics for Teacher Websites
Analytics for teacher websites can provide valuable insights for online educators looking to improve their teaching strategies and optimize the learning experience for their students.
By tracking metrics such as engagement rates, resource usage, and assessment performance, educators can identify areas for improvement and tailor their approach to meet students’ needs.
It’s important for teachers to regularly review and analyze data to ensure they’re continuously improving the online learning experience for their students. With the right tools and strategies in place, analytics can be a powerful tool for enhancing student engagement and performance in online courses.
We recommend reviewing your stats every month, and then using those numbers to discuss with your team about problems and opportunities.
Tips for using analytics for your teacher website:
- Set up Analytics on each of your main platforms like website, course, community
- Identify a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); the main things that you’re going to track
- Come up with a system like once a month I’m going to log them and review on Fridays
- Start making little changes one at a time so that you can improve your performance like getting students to stay longer and prospects to buy more often
- After each successful experiment, update your website and start a different test
So now you’re a lot smarter on analytics for your website or even other properties like your courses.
If you do one thing, at least install some sort of analytics package now like google analytics, so when you’re ready to optimize, you’ll have months or years of data.
You should be a little smarter now. Thanks for hanging out!
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