Throughout the entire worldwide web, there are more than 1.8 billion websites. So, no matter the purpose of your website, one thing is certain: you’re up against a ton of competition.
For this reason, it’s crucial that you do everything you can to improve your site. You’ll want to invest time and money into making your website more effective. Because the more effective your site, the better your bottom line will be. It’s that simple.
One important part of this puzzle is interpreting your website analytics. When you do this correctly, it will greatly help inform you so you can improve your business marketing strategy.
Keep reading for our top tips on website analytics and how to interpret them.
What is Website Analytics?
First and foremost, let’s address an important question: what exactly is website analytics?
Simply put, web analytics involves three parts. First, you’ll collect data about your business.
Next, you’ll analyze that data, turning the numbers into valuable information. Lastly, you’ll take your findings and implement changes and strategies to improve your business.
What Data Should You Collect?
There are lots of different website analytics out there. Let’s talk about the most important ones since business owners have limited tie and resources.
Unique Visitors
First, let’s start with visitors. We like to use a metric called unique visitors, which means the number of individual people who came to your site. This will tell you how many people came to your site or a certain page during a specific time period.
Understanding this metric will help you compare traffic amounts during different periods so you can see the overall impact of your site.
Average Time on Page
Next, consider average time spent on page. This metric will tell you how long people stay on each of your webpages.
This information is helpful because it tells you whether or not your pages are valuable to your visitors. If they are leaving after only a few seconds, your page isn’t doing its job and you should test changing some of the content to improve this metric.
Referrals
This metric will tell you where your traffic is coming from. Are people coming from search engines like Google or Bing? Maybe you’re getting lots of visitors from social media.
Some companies generate large amounts of traffic from links on other websites, like reviews site like Yelp. Learn about Yelp review management here.
At the end of the day, keeping an eye on your referral data will inform your strategy moving forward.
Observing and Interpreting Website Analytics
Now that you’ve read all about website analytics, understanding what they are and how to interpret them, what’s next? It’s time to create a plan for your company and then put it into place.
Soon, you’ll have a better grasp on the true performance of your site.
Want to learn more? Check out our blog for additional business tips and tricks.