Making the Most of Web Analytics

Do you check your website stats regularly? Do you understand what it means and how to make the most of the information?

A while back, we wrote about understanding your website’s log files . Much of this information hasn’t changed, but what has changed is that good web analytics (or website statistics) information is more widely available and there’s much more information available than some web stats packages such as ‘Webalizer’ or some of the other free packages that come with web hosting.

Everyone who has an interest in their website needs to know what’s happening on it, where those all important visitors are coming from, what’s popular on their site and what is and what isn’t working so well with their marketing efforts. Having a good web stats package couldn’t be more important and one of the best free ones available is Google Analytics. OK, it’s yet another way of getting businesses to use Google’s products, but so many people use it now, and the information provided is often much more useful than other free web stats packages. You don’t have to use Google Analytics solely; you can have it running alongside another web stats package to compare results.

Much of the data provided by Google Analytics is standard and what you would expect: visitor numbers (unique and returning), page views, popular pages, visitor paths, referring websites, search engines, keywords used to find the site, which countries visitors have come from, etc etc.

However, there are some additional stats which are really useful. Firstly, if you’re running a Google Adwords campaign, then you can link the adwords data into your analytics and get a complete view of visitors from all of your traffic sources. Another nice feature is ‘site overlay’ in the content section which shows which links on your home page are clicked on and which are the most popular. This could help you if some items aren't clicked on enough to move them to another position on the page to see if it helps with click rates. A couple of other stats that Google Analytics provides are ‘bounce rate’ and ‘goals’.

Bounce rate is the number of one page visits. The higher the percentage, the less likely visitors are interested in your content from the search engine or website they came from. This could mean that your web marketing may not be targeted enough if you have a very high bounce rate, so you might need to edit title tags and meta descriptions, or even review any text ads on Google Adwords you may be running. If you’re bounce rate is over 60% then you may need to do some work in this area. A very low bounce rate e.g 20% may show that most of the keywords your site is being found for is your company name, so highly relevant to those visitors that come to your site, but equally means you may be missing out on traffic from other keywords, so you need to work on your website optimisation.

Finally ‘goals’ – Google analytics allows you to set up a goal, such as completion of an enquiry form, a sale or sign up to a newsletter. This means that you can immediately see in your site stats when a goal has been completed, how much that goal is worth (if you have an e-commerce site), or when you might have received an enquiry through your website. Again really useful stuff as you can track back the path through your site that led to the goal. By downloading the reports in Google analytics, you can also find out which sites or keywords in a search led to a goal, so which of your marketing efforts is working the best!

Further web stats resources:
Google Analytics
Statcounter
AW stats
Hitslink
Site Intelligence – for those of you with deep pockets who want to know everything there is to know about your website!

Category: General Online Marketing