Web Analytics

You’ve got your website complete and it’s out there on the internet. As you start to inform people (by marketing or word of mouth) about your website, it’s important to know how your visitors are interacting when they visit it.

Website visitors are known as “Traffic”. Website analytics are programs that track visitors movement on your website. Some of the basic things you need to know about are:

1. Where did your visitor come from? Was it search engines, social media, direct or referral from another website.

2. How long did they stay on your website? This is important because if you have good content on your website then people will be interested in reading it. If they come to the website and leave straight away, its a sign that something is wrong and you need to make changes.

3. Bounce Rate : A bounce rate is the percentage of people who “bounce” from your website. A bounce means they arrive on your site but do not go to any other pages. A high bounce rate is a bad sign as it means visitors are not finding out about your product or service.

4. Location: If you are targeting your business in a geographical area, it’s good to know where your visitors are based. Analytics software can show you where your visitors are from.

5. Page View Activity: This is very helpful for your marketing because you can see what pages were viewed most on your website. If a page on your website is not receiving visitors, then something needs to change.

6. Exit Link: This will tell you what page the visitor was on when they left the website. With an ecommerce website this is useful as you can see if they were about to purchase and left before completing.

 Installing web analytics software on your website is easy to do. It involves placing a piece of code in the header of your website that is linked to the analytics software provider. Then you can login to your account and see the data.

Google offer a free analytics tool that is very detailed. It may be a little too much for people starting out and there are other analytics packages available. See resources below.