Okay, so you’ve got this website, right? You heard somewhere that you should have that “Analytics” thingy on it so it can track the traffic to your site. So, you (or the person who designed your website) installed it and now you’re all good. Right? Well, sort of. Yes, it’s great that you have analytics embedded into your website and it is steady tracking away, but you really should pay close attention to the data it is gathering. If you don’t, you could be missing out on very valuable adjustments that you could be making to increase the efficiency of your website. Analyzing your analytics can help shape your business goals and marketing efforts. Let’s look at what analytics measure and why they are important to you…
Visitors – It’s pretty common knowledge that analytics tracks the number of visitors to your site, but more importantly, it shows how many unique visitors stop by. Unique visitors are the NEW people that check you out. You are able to see and distinguish between new and repeat visitors and monitor how your site is performing from that perspective.
Traffic Sources – Want to know where all of your visitors come from? Analytics will show you! You can see if they came to you directly… that is, they actually typed in your URL or they found you some other way, such as a link from another website or a search engine. You can also see what browsers these visitors are using. This all is very valuable information because you can place focus on these entities in your business and marketing strategies.
Keywords – Piggy-backing on traffic sources, you can also see which keywords visitors used to bring them to your site. This is EXTREMELY important! The ones that work are the ones you need to make sure are infused into your content and messaging.
Page Views – Which pages are getting the most attention? Your page views will tell you. Now you’ll know what information is most important to the people visiting your site.
Time Spent – Analytics also shows how much time (on average) a visitor spends on your website. The longer they hang out with you, the more engaged they are with your business and content.
So, you see… analytics are not just some website thingy left to run in the background. They should be checked and checked often so that you employ the best practices for optimal website and business performance.
