Even the most basic web site statistics (or analytics) can give you enough information to improve your web site’s performance.
Keeping track of your web stats is especially important if you are doing any form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Web site statistics allow you to easily and quickly see if what you’re spending your money and/or time on is working.
Here are some key web site statistics to pay attention to:
- Unique Visitors - counts a visitor only one time even if they visited your site multiple times during a time period
- Top Entry Pages - pages people first see when they visit your site
- Top Exit Pages - last page visitors view before leaving your site
- Bounce rate - percentage of people leaving a page without visiting any other pages on your site
- Referring keywords - keywords visitors typed into search engines to get to your site
- Referring web sites - sites that sent visitors to your web site
- Referring search engines - search engines that sent visitors to your web site
- Direct visitors - people who go to your site directly
- Repeat visitors - people who have been to your site before
- New visitors - people who have been to your site for the first time
- Most popular pages - pages most frequently viewed by visitors
Be careful not to get bogged down with all the numbers. Web site statistics on their own will not help you improve your site.
What will make your web stats work for you is your ability to:
- Analyze the statistics
- Find what issues need immediate attention and prioritize them
- Figure out the best way to make the changes to fix those issues
- Make those changes in a timely manner
- Analyze the effects of your changes…and start all over again
Want to find web site statistics on your competitors?
Visit Compete.com, and you can find competitor web site information for free. You can look up competitor information such as:
- Unique visitors
- Referring web sites
- Keywords that send traffic to a web site
Google Analytics is a free web site statistics tool that is both powerful and easy to use.
Just sign up at www.google.com/analytics/ and they give you some code to put on every page in your web site that you want tracked.
Don’t know how to make edits to your web site code? Mediatrunk will setup Google Analytics for free when we design your web site. If you already have a web site, we can install Google Analytics for you. Contact us for details and pricing.
Tags: google analytics, web analytics, Web Site Analytics (Statistics), web stats