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Amid a competitive digital marketing landscape, a successful brand empire strictly depends on an authentic connection between a company and customer. This can only be achieved by deep diving into analytics – assessing meaningful data patterns to determine key insights on web traffic – such as click-through rate, abandonment rate, bounce rate and conversion.

In order to drive your website analytics, there are certain terms you must understand inside and out. By mastering these terms, savvy marketers will be able to detect website flaws and modify existing pages to increase their traffic flow and conversions – desired actions by a website visitor including a purchase, event registration, e-newsletter subscription or membership sign-up.

While marketers continually strive to improve their conversion rates, analyzing their abandonment rates are equally as important. An abandonment rate refers to the percentage of visitors who “shop, think about an item enough to actually click to purchase it, and then for some reason or another walk away from their cart in the store and don’t buy anything.” For example, if 50 visitors to your website added a product to their cart and 40 visitors purchased the product, your abandonment rate is 10 percent since 10 visitors didn’t proceed to the final checkout. Clearly, a high abandonment rate negatively impacts your website.

Besides the abandonment rate, marketers must also be mindful of monitoring their bounce rate – the percentage of page visitors who immediately leave without visiting another page on the same website. Although visitors may be initially driven to the website through an email, sponsored ad or website page, a high bounce rate indicates that they’re not fully engaged upon arrival. A marketer’s optimal goal is to convert their click-through rate – the percentage of visitors who click on a link after seeing it displayed – into conversion rates.

If your abandonment and bounce rates are high, you should consider revising your marketing design and copy since the conversion rate is not functioning at a profitable level. Optimal conversion rates are dependent on a well-rounded personalized customer experience. This includes a customer’s entire lifetime relationship with a brand through touchpoints such as product awareness and transaction process, as well as the individual experience within a single transaction.

Besides the cosmetic changes to your website to optimize your return on investment, marketers must also create a savvy search engine optimization (SEO) strategy – the process of using website analysis and design adjustments to increase one’s rank on the results page of a search engine like Google, Bing and Yahoo. In an Entrepreneur article, Jon Rognerud, author and online business consultant, lists a four-step checklist for search engine optimization including target market business analysis, keyword research and development, content optimization and submission, and continuous testing and measuring. While monitoring your website traffic and search analytics is a rigorous and ongoing process, it’s necessary to ensure your click-through rates translate into conversion.