Using website stats to improve your site
It’s a mistake to think that once you’ve set up your website, all the work is done. Like any businesses investment, you should monitor how well your website performs and find ways to improve your website design, content and supporting marketing to give the best results. This article explains how you can use your Internet traffic and website statistics to improve your website.
On this page:
Set objectives for your website
Before you can assess whether your website is performing well, you need to know why you have a website and the outcomes you hope it will achieve. You could have one or several objectives in mind – from encouraging more people to sign up to your monthly e-newsletter, to increased website traffic and comments on your blog pages to help you build better relationships, to increased sales.
Once you know what you want to achieve, you need to find out what information is available to measure the performance of your site.
Get the information you need
Most website hosting services provide statistical information on your website allowing you to track the number of visitors to your website on a daily and monthly basis and which countries your website visitors are from. This information usually also shows the average duration of time spent on your site, the top search engine spiders to crawl your site, the URLs of the top 10 web pages visited, and the top 10 keywords and phrases. Most also report on error codes allowing you to identify broken links and other problems.
If you need more detailed information, free tools like Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics or paid options such as Crazy Egg offer flexible reporting options to provide detailed feedback on visitors to your website, and the effectiveness of your online marketing.
For most analytics programs to work, you need to add code to every page of your website. This is used to track information and create the graphs, pie charts and statistical information giving you details on:
- How people find your site – email, blog, advert, search engine, affiliate marketing, or Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts.
- How people navigate through your site.
- The steps they follow to become customers or where they drop out of the sales process.
- Visitor insights such as their age, gender, interests, demographic information and valuable information such as a breakdown of the value of sales per region.
- The success of PPC campaigns, with a detailed analysis.
Your website objectives will determine the sort of information you need to find. Monitoring the performance of your website over weeks and months allows you to replicate those aspects that work and change those that don’t, and improve the effectiveness of your business website.
Some key stats you should monitor
Here is a list of some of the key statistics you should monitor for your website:
- Unique visitors and visits – how many new and repeat visits your site attracts.
- Average number of pages per visit and average time on site – to get an idea of the number of pages the average visitor looks at and how long they spend browsing your site.
- Bounce rate – to identify how many people leave your site without viewing another page.
- Source of visitors – sometimes also called referrals. This should include whether your website was found via a search engine listing, referring sites or direct traffic.
- Conversion rate – the percentage of visitors who become customers. This will vary depending on the objectives of your site and could, for example, include the number of sales, downloads, or newsletter sign-ups achieved.
- Visitor entry and exit – tells you where visitors entered and left your site. This can tell you whether visitors found what they were looking for, or identify potential problems on certain pages.
- Keywords and phrases – shows a list of the top keywords and phrases used to find your website.
- Errors on pages – helps to identify errors and problems on your website. Keeping track of these helps to maintain a professional and functional site.
If you create specific landing pages for your marketing campaigns, you’ll want to monitor these as well as the return on investment and cost per conversion of any search engine marketing you do.
This article is provided by Business.govt.nz
