Know What Your Website Is Doing: An Intro to Analytics
Websites are pretty much a requirement for marketing a business these days. But it can be hard to figure out just how successful your site is — is it bringing you new customers? Is it helping to educate your existing clients?
To begin to answer these questions you need take a look at your website’s traffic. You need web analytics.
Choosing an Analytics Package
There are thousands of web analytics packages. These applications tell you all sorts of details about the traffic your website receives: what sites are referring lots of visitors to you website, what sort of internet access visitors are using and more. Web analytics software can be divided into two categories: hosted analytics and analytics that you must install yourself. Luckily, there are free options in both that more than adequately address small business’ needs.
AWStats is a good example of web analytics software you have to install. It takes a little technical know-how, but if you work with a web designer, he or she will probably be able to handle installation. Google Analytics is pretty much the main option for hosted analytics — all you have to do to set it up is add a few lines of code to your site’s HTML.
Personally, I rely on Google Analytics. I know I’m providing Google with a lot of information about my site’s traffic, but Google Analytics is just one of the easiest-to-use options I’ve found.
What to do with Analytics
Once your analytics software is set up, you’ll be getting tons of information. Before you go into information overload mode, though, let’s look at how you can use that information.
Knowing how many users you get in a month is nice, but without a few other pieces of information it doesn’t tell you a whole lot. If you take a look at which days during the month — and times of day — that you get the most visitors, you’ll know when to launch any new product, promotion or project. You want to launch before most of your traffic shows up, so that more people see what your business is up to.
Knowing where your traffic is coming from can help you tweak your online marketing plan. If a few websites are sending you most of your traffic, you probably want to build up a good relationship with those sites and approach similar sites, as well. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from search engines on particular terms that you don’t necessarily want to show up for, you might want to spend some time on optimizing your site for other search terms.
Knowing what countries your visitors are located in shows you where you might be able to sell more products. If you’re only set up to sell in the U.S., but you get lots of visitors from the U.K., it might be time to check out just how hard it is to ship to England.
Setting Up Special Analytics
If you’re running a promotion and want to see just how successful it is, you can get information from most analytics packages on how well a particular page on your site is performing. With Google Analytics, for instance, you can set goals: your goal is to get visitors to a specific page, such as a “Thank You for Your Purchase” page. Visitors can only reach this page by making a purchase, and the analytics for just this page can give you quite a bit of information about who is buying from your site. The same technique works on landing pages, confirmation pages and any other page you can think of.
Comparing Information
Your analytics package will be able to provide you comparisons between different variables — like how many new visitors you get compared with how long a visitor stays. You can use all of this information to improve your website, as well as tweak how you market it.
Overall, this is just a very basic introduction to analytics. There are many more things you can do with the right analytics package, and most of them will significantly improve your efforts to market on the web. Do any of you have examples of how web analytics has helped you make a decision or improve your business?
Reader Comments
Excellent tool I recommend 100%!
Google analytics is the best tool around. The only drawback is that it’s not 100% accurate (but then again no tool is) and the stats don’t come in real time.
We are trying to get our social media campaigns moving for our construction marketing business. It’s tough.
According to the imaging tests, the areas of the brain that sustained the most trauma were areas responsible for attention, memory, and visual functions.
Year 2012 has been quite eventful. SRSG also witnessed events and evolved in terms of business verticals, technologies, people and processes.
Adobe premiere pro CS6 graphics
Best Video streaming service provider
Digital asset management solution
Analytics tool is very helpful for SEO point of view. In Analytics to see where website traffic is coming on our website.
Rubber Stable Mats for Horses
It is nice that you posted something like this and I am quite lucky to read it. google analysis tool lot more accurate than other tools.
brazilian hair
Very smooth. Your content and the way I read. It totally freshen me up. ebay
This is actually actually good. Abandoned one arrested out this realisation acclimation so we writing-service-assistant.com are astonished. We are actually analytic about this affectionate of activities. So we accepting all the sharing, and accumulated your time axial this. Please accumulate cutting. They’re
Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to be expensive.auto loan calculator
Professionalism style of written. You have made it in such a way that it may understand the readers easily.
It is nice that you posted something like this and I am quite lucky to read it
Fantastic blog post and very useful information. I must appreciate the brilliant work by brilliant writer. Keep blogging. Best of luck
captain America Jacket
You are saying a surely true. I want to hear much more from you. The level of your thinking is great.
Adam Scott
Very informative blog. Looking forward to reading more from here. Thanks.
I agree with the others that talked about google analytics, you must always check your site for safety and see the way the visitors are coming.
Add Your Comment