Getting Started with Web Analytics

Every business that has a website should be doing something to market or promote it and they should be monitoring the success of those efforts with web analytics. Unfortunately for some companies, especially those that are new to web marketing, the idea of all of the different metrics available for tracking can be daunting. To help you get started off on the right foot this post shares our views on the most important web metrics you should be tracking.

There are many different web analytics services that marketers can use, but we suggest starting out with a tool like Google Analytics because it’s free, feature-rich and not too complicated for beginners.

The best way to get started is to look at the items below:

1. Unique Visitors – This is the number of different people who visited your website in a time period (specified by you). For example, if this number is 300, that means that 300 different people visited your site at least once in the time period you’ve chosen. If this number is low then it probably means that your website isn’t ranking high in search engines, and you should take a look at improving your current search engine optimization strategy.
2. Traffic Sources – This tells you where the traffic to your website is coming from (ex. Search engines, social media). This metric can help you decide where you should be focusing the majority of your website promotion efforts. 
3. Referring Keywords – These are the phrases that your visitors searched to arrive at your website. Hopefully, these keywords are related to your company, and if not it probably means that your website isn’t optimized for the best keywords or phrases for your business. 
4. Top Content – This tells you which pages are getting the most traffic once visitors get to your site. Once you know which content is the most popular then you can create more of it and work to drive more traffic to your site. 
5. Bounce Rate – This metric is the percentage of visits where a visitor enters and exits the site on the same page without viewing any other pages. Monitoring this can help you figure out if your web pages are working effectively to engage your visitors. 
6. Conversion Rate – This measures the ratio of visitors to your site who convert website visits into desired actions like membership registration or newsletter sign-up. If your conversion rate is low then you might need to take a look at your website’s calls–to-action to help you get more visitors to convert.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at May 20, 2010 2:00 PM

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