You’ve invested the time and money and have a brand spanking new website (or redesigned existing site). You’ve taken your overall business strategy into account and have your site well branded complete with a clear call to action. How do you know if your project was a success? Do you know if you are meeting (or at least improving upon) your goals? These answers and more can be found in your web site statistics.
While web hosting companies often offer free and paid traffic statistics, I have found using Google Analytics, which is free, to be the best bet. It offers you rich reporting in an easy to use format at the touch of your fingertips online.
How it works is that you sign up for an account and then have your web designer put the Google Analytics code at the bottom of all your pages (hint: if he/she is using site-wide templates or includes it should be a once and done quick update). After a short wait while Google starts tracking your results, you will be able to see your reports. The nice thing is that once you are set up, you can then access any time frame you choose (as early as the first date you installed the code, of course) to generate reports and view trend graphs.
While there are a lot of neat things you can see about your site, the basics you want to focus on include:
- # of visitors (how many people are coming to your site)
- Bounce Rate (% of visitors who visit only one page on your site and then leave)
- % New Visitors (how many are new vs returning visitors)
- Average time on site (how long do people stay on your site. measures “stickiness”)
- Traffic Source (where is your traffic coming from - search engines? referrals? direct?)
- Top content (what pages on your site are most popular?)
- Keywords (what search words people are using to find your site)
These are the main bits of information you want to know about your site. Of course Google Analytics can do much much more. You can set and track conversion goals (example: how many people make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter), view all kinds of information about your visitors (browsers, connection speed, geographic location) and what visitors do once they get to your site. Google Analytics can work hand in hand with any Google Adwords campaigns you have set up so you can keep your finger on the pulse of the success of those campaigns as well.
You can’t succeed if you don’t measure the results of your activities. With Google Analytics it is easy and free. Whether you have a new or existing website, touch base with your web guru to make sure you are all set up.
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