One of the most powerful tools to aid the success of your online business is website analytics. You can measure and track almost every aspect of your online peformance and develop often suprising and useful insights into your customers and how they use your site.As with most things in the online marketplace a fair bit of jargon has sprung up but once you understand it you can use web metrics to develop powerful online strategies to improve your ROI.
As I mentioned earlier you can track almost any aspect of your site usage but most small businesses with websites should understand these major metrics.
Unique visitors – how many people are coming to your site. Unique Visitors (or UVs) is a pretty good metric to benchmark how your site is peforming, Too few visitors you might want to look at some online advertising options or search engine marketing to bolster your traffic and improve your UVs.
Page views – every time someone looks at a page on your website it is counted as a single Page View if they then hit refresh on their browser that counts as a second page view and so on. This helps you determine the popular pages of your site and then use this information to optimise the pages adding in relevant conversion paths and contact information. If possible consider adding more content along similar lines to your site and make sure to add links from your popular pages to the new content.
Referrers – this tells you where your website traffic is coming from. Usually in the form of website address or search engine name. This helps you tailor you online marketing strategy – for example if you find your search numbers are low you should look at crank up you search engine marketing strategy. If a specific site is sending a lot of traffic your way consider a more formal linking agreement or offer them some free content with lots of juicy links back to your site.
Search terms – these are the words people have typed into a search engine before clicking the link that brought them to your site. You should review these regularly to make sure they are reflected in your search engine marketing efforts and if you are running a pay-per-click campaign you should consider adding your best performing keywords to the mix.
Bounce rate – the percentage of users who hit a page on your site and the browse away to another site without clicking anything or looking at another page. If this metric is high – this varies from site to site but anything higher than 40% and you might want to look at strategies for improving your website bounce rate. High bounce rates can arrise due to poor website design, irrelevant content or badly targetted marketing campaigns.
