Website analytics accelerate your online performance

People love the internet because it gives them fast, easy to access information. They want to know about something, they run a search and more often than not, find an answer.

The same is true for your business. The primary thing any business owner wants to know is: what do my customers want and how can I best provide it? Website analytics allows you to see:

where people go on your site
what messages they respond to
what actions they take
how often they visit
where they are coming from

This information is a market researcher’s goldmine. And it is all possible to access – fast and easy – from your website or with specialist tools.

How to make sense of website analytics data

Online analytics won’t literally give you the name and vital statistics of every person who visits your site - unless they are already on your database. Web analytics software records how often pages on your site are visited (via either logfiles or page tagging), how long people stay and where they have come from.

Some of the useful information you can glean from web analytics are:

Bounces
Actions
Traffic sources

If people are visiting a page and then ‘bouncing’ straight out of your site without further investigation or enquiry, it could be that your content does not match your keyword, or that your messages are not compelling.

If people take action in response to a particular ad campaign, opt-in strategy or other call to action you get a strong idea about techniques and strategies that are working.

Because you can see where people have ‘clicked’ from to reach your site, you can effectively analyse which directories, ads, SEO strategies and SEM strategies are performing best. You can strengthen these and stop wasting time with strategies that are yielding no results.

Use website analytics to measure quality rather than quantity

Even the most sophisticated web analytics software will throw up inconsistencies when it comes to the NUMBER of visitors to your site. This is because every page visit or click is recorded uniquely.

What is more compelling and relevant for you as a business owner is the behaviour of visitors. This indicates both the quality of your website, online strategy and messages and the quality of the leads you are attracting.

There is no point in a website that gets 1,000 hits a day if not one of those hits turns into a genuine prospect or active customer.

The more specific you are about the channel of activity you want site visitors to go through, the more useful website analytics will be for you. And the sooner your website will become a powerful magnet for genuine leads and sales.