What is web analytics?

How does it work, and what is website analytics used for

You’ve put a lot of effort into building your website in your CMS. But do you really know how visitors interact with it? Are they engaging with your content or leaving right away? Are your landing pages converting, or are people bouncing before they even scroll?

Without web analytics, you’re guessing. And when it comes to growing your business, guesswork isn’t enough.

When you use web analytics, you get real data on how people find your site, what they do once they get there, and whether they take action. That means you can stop making assumptions and start making data-driven decisions to improve your website’s performance.

Take tour of Umbraco Engage Analytics

When you track these insights, you can fix what’s not working and double down on what is. This will help you drive major improvements to your website's performance and refine your marketing strategy to increase the engagement with your content and maximize your Return on Investment (ROI).

Why web analytics makes a difference

When you use web analytics the right way, you can:

1. Make your website work better

Some pages perform better than others, and web analytics helps you find out why. You can see which pages people love and which ones need a little work. Maybe a slow-loading page is driving visitors away, or maybe your top-performing blog post could use a stronger call-to-action. When you know what’s happening, you can optimize your site for better results.

2. Create a better experience for your visitors

When visitors can’t find what they need, they leave. But when you use web analytics, you can see where they’re getting stuck. Maybe they keep clicking on a link that doesn’t go anywhere, or they leave the page before they even scroll. Once you spot these patterns, you can make changes that keep them engaged.

3. Increase conversions (without guessing)

Whether you want more sign-ups, downloads, or sales, web analytics shows you what’s working and what’s not. You can test different headlines, layouts, or CTAs with A/B testing to see what gets better results. Instead of hoping your latest update improves conversions, you’ll have data to back it up.

4. Stop wasting time on the wrong marketing channels

Are you investing in ads, SEO, or social media - but aren’t sure what’s actually driving results? Web analytics tells you exactly where your most valuable visitors are coming from so you can focus your budget and energy on the channels that work.

The above features and more are available directly in Umbraco Engage Analytics, and can easily be configured. Take a selfpaced tour of Umbraco Engage Analytics.

How web analytics works

Every time someone visits your website, data gets collected. But how that data is collected and what you can do with it depends on the analytics setup you use.

Most web analytics tools work by adding a tracking script to your site. This script runs in the visitor’s browser and records information like page views, clicks, time on site, and device type. The data is then sent to external servers, processed, and presented in reports and dashboards. However, this approach often relies heavily on browser cookies and can be blocked by ad blockers or privacy settings, which means you may lose valuable insights. This is often referred to as third-party cookies 

Umbraco Engage takes a different approach. Instead of relying on third-party scripts, Engage uses server-side tracking to collect first-party data directly within your own infrastructure. This means you maintain full control of your data while ensuring higher accuracy and stronger privacy compliance. Since the data doesn’t leave your environment for processing elsewhere, you avoid common tracking limitations and can trust the insights you’re seeing.

This makes Umbraco Engage a future-proof solution, designed to keep your analytics reliable even as browsers and privacy laws evolve.

If you are considering Umbraco and Umbraco Engage Analytics, why not take a tour and see the product itself? 

The well known cookie banner, where users will accept or reject cookies. 

What are the key metrics and dimensions in web analytics?

Not all data is useful at the time you look at it. It all depends on what you specifically want to understand with the data. To avoid drowning in numbers, focus on the metrics that actually help you improve your site and content. In Umbraco Engage and most other web analytics tools you can find the following metrics:

1. User metrics: 

• Visitors: These are the unique IDs identified as individual visitors. 

• They can be further broken down into new or returning visitors. If they are new visitors, they have not been seen before in the time range you are looking at.

• Sessions: A session starts when a user visits a website and is active for a given time (this can often be configured in your web analytics tool). If a user sends another interaction event, the session duration is reset.  If a visitor is inactive for more than the given timespan you have configured, it’ll stop the session.

• Average session duration: The average time a session lasted. How it’s calculated: Time of first interaction event minus Time of last interaction event. 

2. Pageview metrics: 

• Pageview: A pageview is recorded every time a visitor loads a page on your website. If a user refreshes the page, it counts as another pageview. If they navigate to a different page and then return, it counts again.

• Avg. time on page The average time a user spends on a specific page. Calculation: Time of first pageview (interaction) event minus Time of last interaction event on that page.
  

3. Engagement metrics: Are people interacting with your content?

• Pages per session: Measures the average number of pages a visitor views in one session before leaving.

• Scroll depth: Tracks how far down the page visitors scroll before leaving or interacting.

• Tracking video engagement helps determine how much users engage with video content and whether they find it valuable.

• Event tracking goes beyond pageviews to measure interactions. This will often be configured manually to fit your specific needs. Examples are: 

• Button clicks – Sign-up forms, download links, checkout buttons. 

• Navigation interactions – Menu clicks, dropdown selections, search bar usage.

• Content interactions – PDF downloads, image clicks, or interactive elements.

4. Conversion metrics: Measuring how well your website drives action

Conversion metrics help you track whether visitors are completing desired actions on your website, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a contact form. These metrics give insight into your website’s effectiveness in turning visitors into customers, leads, or customers. Goals can be:

• Form submissions

• Downloads

• Sign-ups to newsletter

• Engagement with key content

How web analytics helps you improve your website

Tracking numbers alone won’t improve your website—it’s what you do with those insights that makes the difference. When you understand how visitors interact with your site, you can spot problems, uncover opportunities, and make data-driven changes that lead to better engagement and higher conversions.

Here’s how web analytics helps you diagnose issues and improve performance:

Identifying engagement issues

If visitors aren’t spending much time on your pages, it may signal that your content isn’t capturing their interest. Here’s what you can look at: 

• Check time on page: Are users leaving before they engage with your content?

• Analyze scroll depth: If people aren’t scrolling, key information might be buried too low.

• Track exit pages: If many users leave from a specific page, something might be wrong (confusing layout, missing CTA, or lack of next steps).

Reducing high bounce rates

Now, a high bounce rate is NOT the same as bad performance. If your users come to your site, and find the information they need and leave again, then they got what they came for. But a high bounce rate can ALSO mean visitors land on your site and leave without taking any action. This could be because

• The page isn’t relevant to what they expected from their search or the ad they clicked.

• The site loads too slowly, frustrating visitors before they engage.

• The layout, messaging, or CTAs don’t clearly direct them to the next step.

Fixing low conversion rates

You might have plenty of traffic, but if visitors aren’t taking action, your site isn’t doing its job. If that’s the case, web analytics helps you evaluate these things:

• Are people clicking CTAs but not completing the form or checkout?

• Do visitors start filling out a form but abandon it midway?

• Are product pages getting traffic but not generating sales?

Improving site navigation & user flow

If users struggle to find what they need, they’ll leave. Web analytics helps you:

• See which paths users take through your site and where they drop off.

• Identify confusing menu structures or dead-end pages.

• Track internal search queries - if people frequently search for something, it may not be easy to find.

Of course, there are many other use cases and lots of different things available to you in the Analytics area of Umbraco Engage or if you use any other web analytics tools. 

Now that you know what web analytics is and why it matters, the next step is understanding how businesses use it to improve marketing, optimize performance, and increase conversions.

How businesses use web analytics in digital marketing

When you run marketing campaigns, create content for your website in Umbraco CMS, or invest in ads to attract traffic,  you want to know one thing: is it working?

Web analytics, which you can have  available in the analytics tab of  Umbraco Engage, takes the guesswork out of digital marketing by showing you which strategies bring in visitors, what keeps them engaged, and what drives them to convert. Without it, you’re left making assumptions. hoping your efforts pay off.

When you use web analytics correctly, you can:

• Find out which marketing channels bring the most valuable visitors.

• See how users interact with your website and content.

• Identify what stops visitors from converting—and fix it.

Here are just a few examples of how you can use web analytics to improve your digital marketing efforts: 

• Example: A company tests two versions of a product page—one with a short, direct description and another with detailed storytelling. Analytics reveals the detailed version increases conversions by 15%, leading them to roll it out across the site. This, however, is a bit more advanced and requires you also leverage A/B testing in your Content management system, like the built-in feature in Umbraco Engage

• Example: A business discovers that while Facebook ads generate the most clicks, email marketing delivers the highest conversion rate. They shift more resources into email marketing, increasing ROI.

• Example: An online store tracks cart abandonment and sends personalized email reminders to users who left items behind. This leads to a 10% recovery in lost sales.

How Umbraco Engage gives you full data ownership

Umbraco Engage removes third-party dependencies by running server-side analytics inside your organization’s own infrastructure. Instead of sending visitor data to an external vendor, everything stays under your control. And don’t worry - if you still want analytics to be running on your site, we provide a bridging library you can get configured by your developers to have the data in both places. 

Key benefits of owning your analytics data:

1. Your data stays within your organization: No external servers or third-party vendors handle your analytics.

2. Full compliance with privacy regulations: You control data collection, storage, and retention policies, reducing GDPR and CCPA risks.

3. No data sampling or loss: Many third-party tools sample data to save processing power, meaning you only see a portion of your actual analytics. With Umbraco Engage, you get full datasets, every time.

4. Real-time access to raw data: You can analyze and export data however you want, without restrictions from an external provider.

5. Better security and control: No risk of unauthorized data sharing, breaches, or compliance violations from third-party services.

Final thoughts on data ownership
As third-party tracking continues to decline, businesses that own their analytics data will have a competitive advantage.

• No reliance on third-party vendors.

• More accurate insights without cookie-blocking issues.

• Stronger privacy compliance and control.

Umbraco Engage makes this possible—providing a fully integrated, first-party analytics solution that keeps your data where it belongs: with you.

Take control of your web analytics with Umbraco Engage

Unlike external analytics platforms, Umbraco Engage gives you full control over your data. With server-side tracking and first-party analytics, your visitor insights are:

• Accurate – No data loss from cookie restrictions or ad blockers.

• Privacy-first – Fully GDPR and CCPA compliant.

• Owned by you – All data stays within your infrastructure, not with a third-party vendor.

• Integrated with your CMS – No external tools needed—your analytics live inside Umbraco.

• Actionable in real time – Make content decisions instantly based on built-in reports.

With real-time insights, built-in goal tracking, A/B testing, and marketing attribution, Umbraco Engage bridges the gap between web analytics and digital marketing execution—so you can focus on growing your business with confidence.