If you are running a small website, chances are you’ve already heard
of Web Analytics. If you haven’t, it is a tool for measuring traffic of
your website. It provides data on the number of visitors, page views etc
to gauge the popularity of the site. For many people, using analytics
is limited to watching how many more visitors have come to the site, and
repeating the figures to potential advertisers. If used smartly,
analytics is also a marketing tool, an e-commerce tracker, an ad tool,
and the list goes on. In this article, we’ll have a look at basic ways
to use the analytics.
Choosing an Analytics Software
First of all, you need to have an analytics software set up for your
website, which mostly means signing up for an account of an analytics
provider, and adding a few lines of javascript code to your pages.
Google Analytics
is the most widely used analytics tool. It’s also free and integrating
it in a WordPress site is just a matter of adding a plugin to your site!
If you like to have choices, you can search the Internet looking for
some other alternative solutions.
This article lists a number of analytics software and their pros and cons.
Keep your eye on the Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the number of people that after arriving on your
website, don’t browse any other pages and leave. It’s generally
expressed as a percentage of total visitors. The top reasons for having
high bounce rates are:
- Uninteresting Content
- Broken Links
- Erroneous Pages
- Badly targeted Ads
The analytics tool can help identifying the pages that have high
bounce rates and open your eyes to problems that you haven’t detected
before.
Check your Conversion Rate
If your site has a clear goal, then you must have at least one goal
page. For an e-commerce site it’s normally a completed check out page.
For social website like Twitter and Facebook, it’s the page where the
visitor completes the sign up process. The conversion rate is percentage
of the amount of people that are just not getting to your goal pages
but also carrying out the action you want them to do. Conversion rates
are usually low. For an e-commerce site, even a 3% is considered a good
conversion rate! The rule of thumb is to set up a clear path(a sequence
of clicks and page views) to your goal page. You can have the analytics
tool set up funnels
to figure out where they are falling off. Once that problem is fixed
you need to look at where people are going after conversion. Are they
staying on or exiting? If they are exiting, why so?
Track visitors to Target pages
Target pages may appear similar to goal pages but have differfuent
values. If the checkout completion form is the goal page of your
e-commerce site, the product pages are the target pages. These pages are
the first major step to goal completion. After all, the visitors need
to see the product page before they go on to shop for the products. Use
your analytics tool to find out how many visitors are going to your
target pages and what percentage of them are going to goal pages from
these pages. If the rate is low you might need to present your target
pages in a more engaging manner.
Site Search Analytics
Tracking site search is a highly valuable resource for finding out
what your visitors are looking for. Are they able to arrive at the page
they are looking for? If not, there’s clearly a problem with your site
search engine. It may not be returning the results it should be
returning, or worse, it isn’t displaying the results in a useful way
your visitors can understand. Also, if they search for something you
don’t have, you might want them to redirect to alternative pages.
Obviously, if your site sell books, there’s no need to provide
alternatives to a guy who is looking for golf clubs in your site! It
doesn’t make sense. But if he’s searching for a particular book of his
favorite author and it’s not there, you should suggest him other books
of the same author or of the same theme.
Track where visitors are coming from
Probably the easiest way to find out if the link building and ads on
the site are working, is to see where your visitors are coming from. It
makes sense that you keep track of where you get the most returns to
make a wise decision of where to focus your efforts. A properly set-up
analytics account integrated with eCommerce tracking and Adwords
accounts can even show you a direct return on investment for your
individual Adword campaigns; a very useful tool for managing your pay
per click ads.
Installing Google Analytics
If you are using a WordPress powered site then you can easily add analytics tracking to your site by following the how to install Google analytics article.
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