Web Site Analytics
You may spend a lot of time thinking about optimizing your web site. But, are you also paying attention to your web site analytics? For instance do you know how many unique visitors your site had last week? Or how they found your site? Or what pages they visited before they left? While SEO is great for getting people to your site, something that is more important is the actual conversions on your site. Web analytics can help provide the information you need to increase the conversion rate your site gets, which makes your site more valuable.
The most basic piece of web analytics is how many visitors your site receives and how many of those are unique. These visitors create traffic patterns, how long they stayed on the site, how many times they visited the site, which page they look at and so on. Looking at these patterns can help you tweak your site to increase the patterns. For example if a lot of visitors leave at one page in particular you may want to look at that page and see what is encouraging visitors to leave? Is the design or layout confusing? Is the information hard to find or nonexistent? Determine why people visit that page and why they leave and you’ll improve your visitor trends.
You can also find out how people are finding your sites. If they are being referred by other sites and leaving immediately it may be that you have a bad link fit. You can also see if your visitors are coming from search engines and if so, what keywords they are looking for to find you. If a particular keyword has a higher conversion rate then you can focus more effort on optimizing for that one. On the other hand, if you have a keyword that is performing poorly you can stop bidding on it or reconsider how you are positioning your site.
Finally, web site analytics allows you to find 404 errors as well as other design flaws. For instance you can set up a path analysis to see where people go from different areas on your site. If they aren’t taking the actions you’d like to see then you can find out where they leave off and redesign that page to make the navigation more intuitive.
All in all web site analytics allows to see how visitors react to your site and test different strategies. These reports are vital to understanding how effective your web pages are. If you use the available analytics tools you can make recommendations for changes to your website and see how well they work to meet your company’s goals.
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