Do you know how many people visited your website today? Do you know where on the site they went? How long they spent browsing? And who made an enquiry or bought something?
Measuring your website’s visitors is essential for the success of your website! By analysing your website stats you can tell how well your site is performing and make intelligent business decisions.
Luckily there are various ways you can measure your website stats. The best way is to install an analytics package. This is usually fairly straightforward to do and normally involves copying and pasting some code on to each page of your site. I would recommend:
- Google Analytics – Completely free to use and very easy to set-up.
- Stat Counter – The basic package is free but only holds information on 100 of your visitors at any given time.
I personally use Google Analytics for all my website tracking. I highly recommend it.
The Basic Stats
For the non-technical or those only wanting an overview of your visitor stats, most of what you will find in an analytics package is above and beyond your needs. In this case the stats to look out for are:
Visits
How many visits/hits did you have to your site in any given time period? This number doesn’t equal people. One person may come to your site, leave, then return within a few days and this would be registered as 2 visits/hits. If you want the exact number of people to your site, look out for the Unique Visitor stats.
Page Views
How many pages were viewed by your visitors?
Digging Deeper
If you have the time, I would encourage you to delve deeper into your site stats. You can find some really important information, helping you make key decisions and potentially saving you time and money. The following stats are some, which I always keep an eye on:
Bounce Rates
The bounce rate is terribly important. It reveals the percentage of visitors who come to your site then immediately leave when they get there. This generally means either:
- The visitor didn’t find what they were looking for.
- Your site was broken or didn’t load quick enough.
- Your site looks unprofessional or untrustworthy.
Usually it is because a user can’t find what they want or what they were expecting to find. All sites have at least a small bounce rate, after all you can’t please everyone.
If your bounce rate is high, say over 60%, then you need to look at the design and content of your site as well as the sources of your traffic. I mention traffic source because if for example you were listed in a wedding directory in the USA, American Brides would come to your site, notice you were UK based then bounce off immediately!
Traffic Sources
It’s good to get as much traffic as you can to your website, however it should be relevant targeted traffic. Irrelevant traffic will only cause you to have high bounce rates (see above).
Using your analytics you can examine where visitors are coming from and then segment that traffic to further analyse how they use your site.
For example, you get X amount of traffic from wedding directory A, yet looking at the stats you see that this traffic only spends on average 20 seconds on your website. You can then make the decision not to continue paying for that directory.
Do you see how important it is to analyse your stats?
Another part of the Traffic Sources is your search engine traffic. How much traffic is coming from Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines?
If your main source of traffic is the free search engine traffic, then you need to be careful! Over relying on it to bring in your customers is dangerous! Google for example could change its algorithm tonight and your site could plummet down the listings. You could suddenly find yourself with no traffic!
You need to find as many sources of traffic as possible – free search engine traffic, Pay Per Click, e-mail marketing, wedding directories etc
Keywords
By going deeper into the search engine traffic, you can see which keywords people are using to find your site. Using this information you can modify your site so you are tailoring to people’s needs.
For example you may find that visitors who searched for “chocolate wedding cakes” tend to spend longer on your site than those who searched for just “wedding cakes”. You would then put more emphasis on chocolate wedding cakes on your site, maybe by using more photographs or including the phrase more often.
By examining your keywords you will also discover which words people use in your market place. This is great free research, which you can then use in other marketing campaigns e.g. in posters, brochures, flyers, your business cards etc.
Geo Location
These stats refer to the location of your visitors. Is your traffic from the USA or India or Spain when you are a UK supplier? Then you need to work out why you have so much foreign traffic and try and cut out the souce.
This also works on a more regional level. If you provide a regional service and are based in the South East yet most of your traffic comes from Scotland then you need to find out why. Segment this traffic by source so you know how these visitors are finding your site, and cut them off.
Top Content
The Top Content report will show you which pages are most viewed on your site. By knowing this information you can make assumptions about your customers interests and desires. What information are they looking for? What topic is popular at the moment? Which product is viewed more often? By identifying these trends you can create even more content to target your customers and make your site even more popular!
Goals
Finally, Goals. Not everyone’s website will suit Goals although I highly recommend them!
A Goal is the aim of your website. What action do you want visitors on your site to perform?:
- Do you want them to buy your product?
- Do you want visitors to use your contact form to make an enquiry?
- Do you want them to view a certain page such as your contact or product information page?
With Goals, you can see how many visitors convert into your desired action.
Not only this, but you can also segment your traffic. For example segmenting your Goal traffic by source will tell you which traffic source is performing the best in terms of completing your Goals. You can then intelligently assess where to spend your marketing budget.
With Goals you can also set-up Goal Funnels. A Goal Funnel is the route that a visitor might take through your site to end up at your desired action. For example a Bride may first come to your homepage, then visit a product page and then make an enquiry (our Goal).
Using Goal Funnels we can see at what point visitors drop out from our funnel. For example you might get loads of traffic coming to your homepage. Most of this traffic will continue to your product page BUT only a small percentage will then continue to your contact page.
We can tell from this that most visitors are dropping out from our funnel at the product page. Maybe the link to the contact page isn’t obvious enough or maybe its broken? We can use Goal Funnels to see fix problems on our site or to simply improve it.
Wow, that was a long post! I hope you find it useful! If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. Don’t forget to sign up for free email updates so you don’t miss out!
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