Your website, despite its flaws, is an incredible mine of information to help you define a clear trajectory. The statistical audit then proves to be essential to understand how your targets actually use your website and therefore what its strengths and weaknesses are with regard to the behavior of your Internet users.
So what are the indicators to take into account and what do we actually do with them?
In this photo, a team collaborates on a Statistical Audit.
How to carry out a statistical audit?
Before you dive headfirst into conducting a statistical audit , you must first ask yourself the right questions. It is indeed very tempting to look at all the data you have available. But it is important to keep in mind that numerical data without analysis is not really valuable.
First, ask yourself the right questions, those that will help you select the indicators to analyze:
What are my challenges as a company?
What are the goals of my website ?
Then review the history of your website to help you refine your analysis:
Has any work been carried out on my website (rewriting URLs, changing the tree structure, etc.)?
Have acquisition campaigns been carried out? With which channels and landing pages?
What indicators are analyzed in a statistical audit?
There are a multitude of useful indicators to analyze as part of a statistical audit and we would need more than one article to cover them all!
We therefore suggest that we focus on the main indicators to analyze, whatever your business challenges and the objectives of your website:
1. Traffic generation levers
Before knowing what your Internet users do on your website, it may be interesting to know how they get there, in other words what channel they used to find you (search engines, social networks, referring sites, emails, etc.).
Understanding traffic generation can help you in botim database particular during communication or marketing campaigns, to define the most effective acquisition channels .
2. The main landing pages
This involves identifying the pages through which your users first arrive on your site. These pages will help you understand the information your users are looking for and whether these pages have met their needs.
3. Navigation devices
Knowing which device is most used to browse your site is essential. This gives you an indication of the uses and search context of your users and can also help you in the design of your future website. If the majority of your Internet users browse on mobile, you can then opt for a so-called mobile first design or even think about creating a mobile application .
4. The bounce rate
There is no data more taboo than the bounce rate! Some analysts tell you that you have to look at it, others that it is useless, opinions differ. The bounce rate can be interesting to look at because it gives you an indication of the relevance of the page for your Internet users (if the bounce rate of a page is very high , this indicates that your Internet users have left the page without making a single click). However, the bounce rate alone has no meaning and it is essential to cross-reference it with other data such as the average duration of sessions. The blog is the typical example: we often observe very high bounce rates and average visit durations (this indicates that Internet users read the article but do not stay on your site after reading it).
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To go further in your audits
Statistical audits are largely based on analytics solutions (such as Google Analytics, Matomo, AT Internet/Piano, etc.) but these solutions do not always provide you with all the answers!
Two ways to remedy these shortcomings:
Customize the data you send back to your analytics solution: by defining and integrating a tagging plan (or marking plan) on your website, you will be able to collect much more detailed behavioral data (how many contact forms were sent, how many additions to the cart, etc.);
Use additional tools: Hotjar, Semrush, Google Search Console, etc. There are a multitude of tools to measure the performance of your website . The choice of tool depends above all on the data that interests you.
