Maximize Page Performance on Your Website Using Embedded Analytics
Page performance is critical when it comes to effective marketing on your business’s website. Fast loading and quick responses to actions significantly affect the likelihood webpage visitors will purchase your products and services. In every business has a website, managers have struggled time and again to maintain a high level of page performance.
Embedding analytics to monitor page performance helps you track key metrics and KPIs that can determine the quality of the experience for potential viewers of your webpage, such as page load times and pages viewed per session. Through such metrics, you gain insights that you can use to improve your webpages and increase desirable page-viewer activities. In the course of this blog, I will explore the following subtopics to learn about how embedded analytics can enhance your daily webpage operations:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedding a page performance dashboard
- Bold BI’s page performance dashboard
- How to embed analytical tools in marketing domain apps
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. From your webpage admin back end, you can use Bold BI to monitor the marketing of your products to reach more customers.
Benefits of embedding a page performance dashboard
Embedding analytics for page performance helps managers improve their websites and maintain quality pages for viewers. It can also be used to devise marketing strategies by providing management with the data they need to determine what page viewers want, which in turn yields more income for the business. Some of the key benefits of applying embedded analytics to page performance include:
- Manage websites economically
- Optimize website ranking
- Increase customer retention
- High level of surveillance
Manage websites economically
Embedded analytics for page performance helps marketing managers track KPIs and metrics such as page views, unique page views, average pages per session, and page view summaries. This allows the marketing team to plan effectively for future page setups and monitoring processes. It gives them the necessary insight to collaborate with the web team to manage page performance so that content is delivered swiftly to viewers. If the marketing team finds certain pages are content-heavy and slow to load, they can look for solutions in-house with the web team or from a third party. Also, the insights gathered help the website managers focus their efforts on the website’s functionality.
Optimize the website ranking
Embedded analytics helps marketing and website teams track metrics and KPIs such as time to interact, conversion rate, and user satisfaction. With these figures, the website team can easily and clearly define website performance goals that can be used to motivate the team as a whole, with the ultimate goal and result being webpages that are easily accessed and used by viewers. The marketing team can ensure the company’s business goals are achieved by implementing trending SEO details to capture more page viewers through higher placement in search results. This increases the company’s web ranking, which expands the audience of the company’s product marketing and leads to more business.
Increase customer retention
Embedding analytics for page performance helps you track key metrics and KPIs such as bounce rate, request per second, time to start render, unique visitors, lead generation, and average session duration. Tracking these metrics helps sales team and marketing team leads better engage with viewers and take specific actions based on the viewer response to a page. By working closely with the web team and reporting their first-hand experiences as well as the viewer experiences, projects can be undertaken to improve the website and increase webpage visit durations, attract more unique visitors, and reduce bounce rates. With such insights and efforts, the customer retention rate increases as the monitoring processes enhance the viewers’ experiences.
High level of surveillance
Embedded analytics helps website administrators track metrics and KPIs such as page speed and load time, time to the first byte, hardware utilization, and more. Using this information, they can run their pages smoothly and diagnose problems consistently to prevent virus threats and bugs. Staying on top of page performance will ensure reduced load times and increased page speeds. Through this surveillance by the administrators, the organization can secure its website for all users and viewers, leaving them satisfied with the services rendered.
Bold BI’s Page Performance Dashboard
Embedding the Bold BI Page Performance Dashboard into your application provides an analysis of your webpage performance and operation using your Google Analytics data. This improves the oversight of the page and functions through a better monitoring process. You can gain insights into page views, unique page views by date, and the page performance over the last seven days.
The following are the key metrics and KPIs in the Page Performance Dashboard:
- Page views
- Unique page views
- Average time on page (seconds)
- Average pages per session
- Average page load time (seconds)
- Unique page views by date
- Page load time by date
- Page times — redirection time and domain lookup time by date
- Page views summary
Page views
This card widget shows the number of page views for the selected month.
Unique page views
This card widget shows the number of unique page views for the selected month. It conveys the number of individuals visiting the page.
Average time on page (seconds)
This card widget shows the average time a user spends on a page.
Average pages per session
This card widget shows the average number of pages viewed per session.
Average page load time (seconds)
This card widget shows the average page load time.
Unique page views by date
This spline chart shows the measure of total page views by date. Based on past data, marketing leads can predict future page views and take necessary actions to increase future views.
Page load time by date
This spline chart shows the measure of the page load time by date.
Page times — redirection time and domain lookup time by date
This stacked area chart shows the measure of total redirection and domain lookup time by date. It gives the web administration team an overview of page performance so that it can come up with solutions to make pages more efficient for all viewers.
Page views summary
This grid shows the details of the analyzed page views with the page title, path, total entrances, total exits, and total unique views. Pages with more than 1,000 unique views are highlighted in green.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Page Performance Dashboard demo.
How to embed analytical tools for page performance in marketing domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into web marketing applications. Bold BI can be used to embed your dashboards in apps for more than 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, and Vue with ASP.NET Core. In the rest of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your marketing team has an administrative website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
First, create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like site/site1. For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use cloud. If using Bold BI, you should use enterprise.UserEmail : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication, and you can get it from the Bold BI server. Click the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and then click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click the Generate Secret button. On clicking the button, a secret key will be generated. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log in to different applications separately.
Step 5: Create a Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference the required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your ASP.NET MVC applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help the marketing department and website team be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and begin creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on September 6, 2022.
