JuliannaSo you’ve launched a website and now you want to know how it’s performing. It goes without saying that getting a handle on your web stats is important. The earlier the better. Accurate measurement and meaningful analysis are pre-requisite to increasing your online success. Really, the act of measuring is important in and of itself. Why? Because anything you take the time to measure and monitor eventually improves.
Engaging in web analytics from the get-go gives you the distinct advantage of detecting trends early on, before your website becomes a beast-of-burden. This allows you to optimize your website for business goals and user needs incrementally, responsively. Online businesses need to know things like where their visitors are coming from and how their visitors are interacting with their website to diagnose trends in visitor acquisition, conversion and retention.
But back to your question: Where should you begin? The best advice for small business owners undertaking web analytics for the first time is keep it simple!
Most webhosting solutions today come with some sort of ‘server-side’ webstats package; while these tend to be pretty basic, sometimes that’s all you need for a simple, new website. If your new website sells product online, you may want to try a more sophisticated web analytics program such as Google Analytics which generates detailed statistics about where your visitors are coming from, how long are they staying and why they are leaving your website. And in case you didn’t know already, Google Analytics is free, and integrated with Google Adwords allowing you to track campaign results.
Irrespective of what program you are using, it is easy to feel overwhelmed when looking at a mountain of data. The learning curve for web analytics is long, so if you’re just getting started it’s preferable to choose a few key metrics and concentrate on understanding and working with those. After all, learning how to interpret key metrics and transform them into meaningful information is far more important than numbers, ratios and percentages. This is accomplished by analyzing metrics that tie into your business objectives or online goals. These can be anything, for instance upping newsletter subscriptions, increasing views of a particular page or decreasing shopping cart abandonment.
Here are five simple metrics for you to begin with.
Unique Visitors and Visits – Arguably the most important measure of how many people are coming to your website. Unique visitors are individuals who have visited your website at least once in a fixed time frame, for example one month. Sites often calculate unique visitors based on the IP address information found in the log files, and sometimes through cookies. Most measurements of unique visitors are estimates. A basic rule of thumb is unique visitors should increase month by month. Look for patterns that relate to your business activities, for example publishing new content, advertising initiatives, etc. While there’s lot’s of factors that can impact the accuracy of your unique visitor data (see: 15 reasons why all unique visitors are not created equal), this is one of the most important measures to start tracking from the get-go!
Visits show the total number of times people, or search engine robots, have visited your website. A visit begins when a person or robot enters your site with an entry click and views (or spiders) a succession of one or more webpages. The end of a visit is signaled by an exit click or a period of inactivity.
Page Views – Page views are the number of files that requested and loaded by your web server. This is a useful measurement for determining if changes to webpages result in more visits and an important indicator of potential ad revenue.
Referrers – referral occurs when you click on a link to go to another webpage. Referrals include the traffic your receive from another websites, bookmarks, email links or via direct navigation (typing a URL directly into the browser). This one is telling as it shows you where visitors are coming from and who is sending them (linking) to your website.
Keywords – These are words or phrases entered into search engines. They are how people find your website. Useful keywords, or phrases relate to the subject or content of your website and describe the information being sought by the surfer. When someone clicks though to your website your webserver logs what search terms that were used and webstats/analytics program reports on these. If you haven’t researched your search terms there’s a good chance that your site is not generating the traffic it could!
Here’s some further reading and free online tools that might be for getting started:
Google Analytics, Google Analytic Blog
Google’s Keyword Select Tool
Statcounter.com – free invisible web tracker, hit counter and realtime web stats
103Bees Search Term Analysis Tool
SearchEngineGuide.com article “Analytics – you can’t afford NOT to track”
Opentracker.net’s Glossary of Web Analytics terminology