site bytes

Don’t know how your website is performing? Then how about getting started with web analytics? Try Google Analytics – it’s free – all you need is a Google email (gmail) account. Many host providers also provide their free version of analytics software. Here are few highlights to help you get started:

Referring sites: where is my traffic coming from?

This report will tell you how potential customers are getting to your site. Do they arrive via Google, Yahoo or another search engine? Through your press, an article or blog? Or were they referred from another website?  Perhaps you need to work on optimizing your content for search engines, drum up more publicity for your company or write some articles to attract business. Knowing how your customers are getting to you will help you figure out what you need to work on and which avenues are already working for you.

Keywords: how are customers finding me?

This area tells you which keywords were used and clicked upon to find your site. This helps you understand which words might be worth paying for in a paid search campaign or incorporating into your site’s content to improve your standing in search results.

Bounce Rate: who cares about me?

The bounce rate gives you the percentage of people that landed on a page and who left without clicking any further into the site.  (Let’s face it, you can’t be all things to all people.) Some users are going to arrive at your site and find that it’s not what they want. And you won’t find statistics on what’s considered a “good” bounce rate for an industry, so much of your analysis here will be subjective. But if you’re selling “web design” and 80% of the people who enter “web design” arrive at your site leave without researching you further…it’s time to reassess and make some changes.

Geographic Detail: am I getting through locally?

If you’re targeting a regional audience, check out this section to make sure that your site is optimized for that region (Google’s recent changes may also help you by automatically displaying you as a local result) and that the majority of your traffic is coming from areas to which you choose to sell.

Time on Site / Pageviews: am in interesting?

This gives you an idea of how engaging your site is. If users spend time on more than one page to read more about your company, that may be an indication that you’ve got their attention. Note that the figure for time on site may be a bit misleading because some users will leave a site up on their browser for hours.

Unique Visitors: how many are coming to my door?

Unique visitors are the number of unduplicated visitors over a certain time period. Each person/computer is only counted once, no matter how many times they return to your site. If you match this up against how many conversions or sales you received from your website, you can get an idea of your conversion rate – the % of unique visitors that are responding to your call to action (that is, doing something you want them to do on your site).

There’s much more to web analytics, but understanding these terms will help you start digging in to all those graphs and charts!