Are you using web site statistics to maximise the effectiveness of your web site?

We often hear comments like ‘my web site really isn’t working’.  Our first response is to ask ‘why?’ Most people don’t know the reason, and have no idea how to find out.

To maximise the value of your web site you need to measure it’s success and shortcomings. If you had a store and no one came through the door, that would be and immediate clue that something was wrong. Often, however, even when the information is available many businesses do not take advantage of the valuable information site statistics can provide. This information can often be very confusing to new comers to the world of the internet with foreign terms such as hits, bounces and pages served!

But do not give in, there are people who can help you learn to read and understand these statistic and how it all works. You can then make fact based businesses decisions to improve your web site performance and maximise it’s contribution to your business. So, to make it easy to get started, or restarted for those who haven’t kept up with things,  I will outline a simple staged strategy for you.

1. First and foremost, understand a web site is not a stand alone item, it is part of your total business marketing and sales strategy. Left in isolation and neglected it will not meet your long term needs and will detract from your marketing efforts.
2. If you do not have access to web site statistics, particularly Google Analytics then get some set up. Talk to your web developer, they will be able to help. Remember a page counter does not constitute a reliable source of web statistics. If you have been getting Google Analytics reports, dig them out and familiarise yourself with them.
3. If you have not already done so, write down the results you aim to achieve from your web site. Make them measurable and quantifiable. Make them achievable as well. As a small business you may never get or be able to service millions of customers.
4. Now the fun bit, lets analyse some of our statistics and see what they tell us. First though, lets get a clear idea of what these foreign terms mean.
   Below is a graphic taken from a very basic web site statistics package.

You can see that in November this site had 419 visits, and the visitors  looked at 459 pages.

Now look at the hits - 3692 hits! That’s over 8 times the number of pages seen. Sounds great, but people often confuse hits with visitors. Hits are in fact every graphic and file that a web page is made up of. Some web pages can have upward of 10 files that make up the page. So if someone said they had 10,000 hits they probably had in reality only 1000 pages viewed.

Note the above statistics also include search engines looking at the site so the real number is even smaller. In the above case over 30% of the traffic was search engines indexing the site. In fact only 289 visits were real people, a huge difference to 3692.

So lets focus on using Google Analytics as a reliable source of quality information. Look for number of visits, bounces (this when they look at one page and leave), average pages viewed and time on site. Long term we want bounces to drop and the others to rise. Are all pages being viewed? if not ask yourself why.

Finally look to see how visitors arrived at your site. Check the search terms used, if they are irrelevant perhaps you need to rework the site content.

Take this information and make a plan to update the site with your marketing people and web developers.

1. Promoting your site is the next item to address, have you put your web address on your car, your business card, letterhead…. Everywhere? The more places you put it the better the response will be.
2. Get involved in social media, but make sure it is relevant and positive.
3. Ask customers how they found you, ask if they have seen your site and if so what they would like to see provided on it.
4. Make you site interesting, up to date and give people a reason to come back.

This is just a brief introduction to using web site statistics to improve your web site results. If you need help getting started ask an expert for help, its well worth spending a little time on this.  It is better to know and make changes than to sit back and hope!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Self Help, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.