How do you know if your website is working? You may have put a lot of time, money and energy into building a great website, but how well does your website convert visitors into leads and buyers? That is what web analytics can tell you.
What is Web Analytics?
Simply put, web analytics is the process of measuring who is coming to your website and analyzing what they do while on your site. It includes things like what sites send you traffic, what pages are most popular, what keywords have the highest conversion rates, how many pages people visit and how quickly they leave.
Why Use Web Analytics
Here are three reasons why you should be using web analytics on your website.
- Helps you monitor your visitor activity. – Web analytics tells you who is coming to your website, how long they stay, and which pages they leave from. It can also tell you if traffic is up or down from last month or last year.
- Helps you optimize your website. - Web analytics tell you which keywords bring in the most traffic, and of that traffic, which visitors take action. By optimizing your website for the keywords that convert best, you can dramatically improve your website conversion rates.
- Helps you create an internet marketing plan. – Web analytics give you real world statistics to help you make better decisions about which keywords to target in other marketing strategies (such as pay-per-click advertising) and which pages to send visitors to for the highest conversions.
How To Start Using Web Analytics
You can start using web analytics today for free with Google Analytics. Just sign up for an account and they will give you code to add to your page. After a few days, you can start monitoring your results.
Which Web Statistics Matter?
Reviewing your web analytics reports can be frustrating if you don’t know what to look for. Here are seven metrics you should look at.
- Visitor Count – Your visitor statistics tell you how many people visit your site and how many of them are first-time visitors compared with repeat visitors.
- Keywords – By analyzing keywords, you can determine which keywords bring you the most traffic and how much of that traffic converts to subscribers, leads and product sales. Many people find generic keywords bring lots of traffic but those visitors don’t stay long on the site or don’t convert well. By analyzing your keywords, you can determine which keywords convert the best and optimize your website for them.
- Visitor Time Spend on Site – This tells you how long visitors spend on your website. Are visitors reading your content? If the time spent on your site is short, the answer is probably not. Longer times show that visitors are interested and are taking the time to evaluate your products and services.
- Bounce Rate – Your bounce rate tells you how many people visit one page on your site and leave. If you have a high bounce rate, visitors don’t find your site interesting enough to stick around.
- Popular Pages – Which pages are most and least popular with visitors? This tells you what people are most interested in and allows you to create more of that type of content.
- Exit Pages – Where do visitors exit your site? This can be extremely useful if, for instance, people exit during your checkout process. Do you lose people as they are trying to buy your products? Before they complete your form? That can tell you your buying process is too complicated.
- Traffic Sources – How do visitors get to your website? With analytics, you can see which search engines and referring websites bring in the most traffic.
By analyzing your website traffic and studying visitor behavior patterns, you can determine how people actually use your website, which elements of your site work well, and where adjustments are needed.
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