When you think about the goals of a website, the words engagement, lead generation, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) come to mind, right? Well to reach those goals, first we have to know the basics.
By monitoring your website analytics, you can monitor the habits of site visitors. You can use free tools such as google analytics, or really dive deep with marketing automation software, but either way we want to find out who visits your website, how long they stay, and what pages they visit.
The more you know about the traffic on your website, the better you can evaluate your website’s performance and if your marketing is attracting the audience you want.
What’s important to know? Here’s a good place to start:
Those people who stop by, but don’t stay very long. The ones that visit one page, but don’t engage with the page they are on. Or, they don’t move on to a second page on your site, therefore not triggering any activity that would implement tracking the visitor while on your site.
Key: Get people to your site, then keep them there.
The total number of visitors to your site over time. Total Visits, is a little different since it can track multiple visits by one visitor.
Key: Power in numbers! The more visitors you have, the easier people are finding your site and the better your chance of engagement with them.
A running count of how many times a page is loaded in the browser.
Key: Make sure your website is easy to navigate, so that visitors can access additional pages on your site quickly.
The average number of pages a visitor hits during a single visit.
Key: The more pages visited, the more engaged the visitor.
How long a visitor spends on your website, per visit.
Key: This depends on the content on your site, but anything over two minutes is a great starting point.
This is where someone is coming into your site from. This could be a search engine, a partner website, a blog, or social media.
These are the pages that a user is entering your site on the most, usually the home page.
Now that you know what you’re looking for, pull up your web analytics and take a good look. What’s going well? What can be improved?
