Using Web Analytics to Better Your Site and Your Bottom Line

How frequently do you check your web traffic status? If your answer is never, then it is time you begin doing so. Measuring and analyzing your site's success is an essential step which is frequently overlooked by many site owners. Your sales might be pretty solid for your website but without the knowledge of your visitors such as who they're, where they go, what they are looking for, where they leave from and what turns them off, you might be losing many prospective customers. By analyzing your site along with your marketing campaigns you can improve the overall performance. Web analytics is Measuring the results against your goals and checking how much success your website has been able to accomplish.

Web analytics remain one of the most essential ingredients of successful online businesses. They help keep track of visitors and render critical data as to how your site is doing with the audience. Through web analytics, it is possible to learn about your visitors and their views.

Definition:

Web Analytics is a series of reports giving quantitative indicators of the behavior of the visitors of a site. It tracks the movement of visitors and the cause of his/her visit. In other words, it supplies a well-defined report of the performance of your site and the trends. From these reports and trends the site owner is able to produce and implement more effective programs to increase sales.

There are two types of web analytics: on-site and offsite web analytics.

On-site web analytics: This type of web analytics assesses a visitor's session on your site. This means it checks the pages that encourage people to purchase your product or service, the pages that drive them away and the ones drawing more visitors. It measures the website performance in a commercial context. The information gathered from here is used to compare against the key performance and used to better the marketing campaign. This information is gathered with the use of logfiles, and by tagging each webpage with a bit of Javascript.

Off-site web analytics: You can make use of this even if you do or do not own/ maintain a website. It assesses the assorted opportunities in the market such as prospective customers, the visibility of a site and other factors that affect a website promotion.

So, how do you get these "analytics" again? Well, as stated before, you can insert some code into your website and use a free, but Amazing!, platform like Google Analytics to review your stats. On the other hand, the good thing about employing a reliable website hosting service is that every time someone visits your site, your web host server registers the user's activities in a log file. The information in this log is usually abbreviated and cryptic making it difficult and time consuming to use. But, your Web host generally uses a software tool to import the log-file data into a built in database which in turn translates the data into readable and easy to understand statistical reports.

Specifically, a few things need to be tracked for every online business:

Bounce rate:

The bounce rate helps in learning why the visitors are likely going away from the website. The higher the bounce rate, the more visitors are not interested in your website.

Visit length:

Determining the average length of time of visitors remaining on your website proves helpful. If your visitors are lingering around your site for sometime then they are probably finding the information at your site useful. Therefore, learning about the reader's pursuit can be easily evaluated from the visit length. If, however, the average time on your site is 12 seconds, there's a problem.

Visit depth:

Whether the visitors to your website are viewing the other pages of the site or not, determines the visit depth. If some people have visited virtually all of the pages of your website and passed some quality time at each web page then it signifies your site is excellent. However, if the visitor has visited several web pages but does not spend more time at each page then, it is likely not a good sign. Higher visit depth certainly will help the growth of your online business.

Returning visitors:

The returning visitors suggest that you're having some loyal readers. If some readers are returning to your site repeatedly then, chances are that they like your site and find the information useful. Such readers could be called loyal visitors. The more faithful visitors your website has, the more popular your site is going to be.

Most search engines consider all of these as factors in their algorithms for search engine ranking for some particular keyword. Therefore, it's important to make a note of all of these points and measure accordingly. But these are just the staples. It can, and does, go much than this.

In the past, web analytics used measure things like server hits, entry pages, exit pages, unique visitors, repeat visitors, first page visited and the time spent on the website. The advanced web analytics are more business specific and can show us conversion ratios, browse to buy rates and customer acquisition costs. As the technology improves web analytics are able to help us find other facets of the web as well.

At present web analytics help us analyze your visitor's behavior. This information could be used to better your SEO strategies, keyword selection, site architecture and design. You can also improve the marketing methods and follow the proper steps to bring relevant traffic on to your site. In short, web analytics is the best way of improving your return on investment (ROI).

If you are ready to take the leap into marketing your business on the web, creating some quality content, optimizing your website for the search engines, or setting up web analytics, give us a call or send us an email! We offer many services, from website evaluation to full SEO and online marketing campaigns, that will help you put your business on the right track with respect to all things cyberspace! Hit our Contact form or Call Today!

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