Web Analytics – Take These Three Steps to Better Understand and Improve Your Website

Web analytics analysis is the process of tracking how people find and interact with your website.

If you’re a business owner with a website and you’re trying to sell a product or service, being able to effectively analyze your Web analytics is crucial to your website’s success.

The three key Web analytics metrics to understand are:

• Traffic sources– where are your visitors coming from?
• Visitor action – what are people doing when they get to your website?
• Keywords – what keyword queries are searchers typing into search engines to find your website?

In the following sections, we’ll break down these metrics into a three step process to better understand Web Analytics and improve your website.

Step One: Know Your Traffic Numbers

Do you know who is coming to your website? Do you know how they’re getting there? Do you know if they’ve been to your site before?

If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you can get this data by installing Google Analytics on your website. Google Analytics makes one of the best Web analytics software tracking packages available…and it’s free! Once installed, you can find out how many visitors are coming to your website on a daily basis, what hour of the day they’re visiting your website, as well as how your visit numbers are trending.

Armed with this information, you can use the data to make improvements to your website (which we’ll discuss in the next two sections). As you continue to upgrade your website, you can track the changes and see if they are helping to increase your traffic numbers. The more you increase the traffic to your website, the more people you can expose to your business, your service or your products.

Step Two: Get to Know Your Visitor Behavior

Once people do get your website, what are they doing when they get there? Are they staying on your website long enough to learn about your company, or are they leaving soon after they arrive?

Bounce rate is a Google Analytics metric that tells you what percentage of people immediately “bounce” off your website. A high bounce rate means your website may be in trouble. The number of page views users are triggering is also a good indicator to the health of your website. Low page views means users aren’t exploring your website.

To try to reduce bounce rate and raise page views, you can:

• Add more inline links – these are anchor text hyperlinks you should include in your sentences and paragraphs to take users deeper into your website.

• Better visual cues – be sure to add design elements to your web pages that are calls-to-action for visitors, such as sign-up forms, free estimate buttons, colored text boxes, etc.

• Simplify your site architecture – make sure your website navigation is clear and straightforward. Create a usability focus group to navigate your website. Give them specific tasks to accomplish on your website. Listen to their feedback.

Step Three: Do Your Keyword Analytics Research

Do you know what keywords searchers are using to find your website?

Google Analytics records the specific search queries (keyword search terms) that visitors use to find your website. Having access to this information is extremely beneficial to your website. Once you know what keywords users are associating with your website, you can optimize your website accordingly. What this means is you can begin to create keyword-specific content for your website that are themed around these keyword queries. Having more relevant keyword rich content for your website will make for a better user experience and more traffic from the search engines.