ne of the major advantages of today’s digital age is the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts. This is especially true for websites, where free programs like Google Analytics provide data that tell you who is visiting your website, how they found it and what they’re doing on the site once on it. Ultimately, analyzing your website’s stats can help improve your site’s content strategy, helping to attract new users and giving current users better and more relevant information.After all, “What gets measured, gets managed.” ~Peter DruckerFor some, the mere mention of analyzing website data might induce a mild panic attack. And for good reason. Even Google’s widely used Analytics dashboard can be intimidating at first glance. However, there are a few terms and stats that, when tracked, can truly change how well your website works for your business.
Here is a glossary of common terms you’ll find:
- Session: A session is a period time a user is actively engaged with your website.
- User: Individual visitors to your website (includes both new and returning visitors).
- Bounce Rate: Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).
- Pageviews: Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
And here are seven website stats you should be tracking:1. MOM and YOY Sessions
Sessions over any given time period give you an idea of how many times people are accessing your website. It’s always interesting to compare whether your sessions are increasing, decreasing or staying the same month over month and year over year in similar time periods. For example, is traffic increasing during a planned marketing blitz, or seasonal retail season?
2. Returning vs New Users
Of course you want to understand how many people are visiting your site, but it’s especially important to note returning versus new users, and the differences in their behavior. Most statistics found for websites can be compared between these types of users, letting you know how your content is working for each.
3. Average Session Duration
Understanding how long people are staying on your site once they get to it will tell you if your content is “sticky” – that is, is it interesting enough to capture someone’s attention and keep it. How long you ideally want your users to stay on your site depends on what action, if any, you want them to take.
4. Bounce Rate
Keeping track of your site’s bounce rate will help inform whether your home page content is engaging enough. Unless you have a one-page site, most businesses should create a site that encourages users to visit multiple pages before exiting.
5. User Demographics
Understanding where your users live and what language they speak will help tell you if targeted marketing efforts are working, or perhaps needed. Language considerations are also important in our ever-increasing melting pot of a nation.
6. Desktop vs Mobile Access
Make sure you know what percentage of your users are accessing your sites from mobile devices versus laptops or desktops. This should inform your site’s mobile strategy, such as image size (e.g. are you optimizing for retina displays?) and content length.
7. Acquisition Sources
How are people finding out about your website, and what sources are driving the most traffic to your site? This is especially important if you are spending dollars on search, display and/or social media advertising. It will also let you know what keywords people are using to search for your business, and whether or not your social media content is successful in getting people to click through to your site.
8. Pages Visited
Once on your site, what are people doing? What pages are most visited, how are they getting to various pages, and what pages have the longest average time on page? This is especially important to measure to understand if the content you are providing on your site is useful, and produces an action that you are encouraging (e.g. signing up for an event, purchasing something, etc.).Starting with these seven areas will help provide actionable information to improve your website’s user experience and maximize any related inbound marketing efforts.
How has tracking stats helped change your website strategy?
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