You can't improve something without measurements
How can you say that something is “better” without knowing the previous state? That's impossible. Of course, you can tell something “by eye.” How can you tell if an investment, such as a website, is successful if you don't know if it has produced anything? You can ask customers if the site helped them anything, but this is not ideal. To measure progress, we need to have some kind of benchmark. Something like that is given to us by analytical tools, which allow us to measure the number of page views, the number of unique users, but also other, more complicated metrics, such as conversion rate. These metrics help us make data-driven decisions, so we're more likely to get it right.
What values to measure?
Defining what values we need is not obvious. In many cases it depends on the type of business, often the simplest values - the number of impressions and unique users - are enough. Such data provide basic information.
If we have many sources of traffic to the site, it is worth trying a more complex strategy - to each link, for example, in social media, it is worth adding the appropriate UTM parameters, which will allow us to define from which platform and within which type of post a given user came to our site. Analytical tools can “catch” such parameters and then provide us with these values.
Another of the key values is the conversion rate - it tells us what % of visitors perform a key action, such as submitting a contact form. This information can allow us to determine the correctness of our changes to the site, as well as its overall performance.
What to use for measurement?
There are many web analytics tools on the market. We haven't used all of them, but we've managed to try a few solutions, by far the best of which is Posthog (this is not an advertisement), and this is the tool we use, for implementing more complex analytics on the site. The big advantage is that Posthog can be used not only for on-page measurements, but can be used to measure the effectiveness of complex applications, and is not limited to measurements on just one page. Additional features, such as a heatmap, further help you verify your on-page changes.
Conclusions
Analytical tools on a website, can bring huge benefits, for those who will use them to verify the validity of their actions. Such an investment, can bring a quick return, especially when it helps identify potential errors in marketing efforts.