I hope that most of people have some sort of web analytics installed on their website. I love Google Analytics, firstly because it is free and secondly it is good enough analytics for small business websites. There other free tools but I think that Google has this product worked out quite well.

Problems with web analytics and reports

The biggest problem of any web analytics software is that it provides a lot of data. It has data about almost about everything.You could be browsing and using analytics for hours every day. Unfortunately just looking at graphs won’t do much. Unless the analytics reports are actionable they are useless.

What to track

What to track really depends on type of website and business that you are having there are some some things which everyone should track. Google Dashboard provides snapshot of most important data that are available. Some thing are more important than others and don’t be fooled by big numbers.
Here is a list of statistics I like to track:

Number of visitors

There are groups of visitors, unique (“Absolute Unique Visitors” in Google) and overall visits(“Visits” in Google). Of course more visitors the better but the visitors must be “good visitors”. I will write more about how to recognize “good visitor”. What I am measuring is change of number of visitors compare to past. The number is hopefully growing with time so I know that my efforts with online marketing pays off.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is percentage of customers who has visited a webpage but did not click on any link. It is usually best to keep bounce rate as low as possible. Usually the bounce is about 50%. If a bounce rate is higher on homepage or a webpage you should consider doing something about it.

Top content and top landing page

Top content pages tells you what pages are the most visited by your visitors. You should have your most important content with action buttons on those pages. Top landing pages are pages where visitors usually land when they come from internet. Of course those pages should make visitors to explore the website more, click on links or make them to do an action.

Traffic sources

It is good to know what source sends you most traffic. You should be able to see which marketing efforts are working and which are not working. You can always see if there is an improvement. If you are running SEO campaign you should see improvement in organic traffic sources. If you are on social media those sources should bring some traffic. If you are running affiliate campaign or have advertising on other website those website should bring traffic.

Keywords

I like to check what people type in when they search on Google and land on my website. You can learn a lot from keywords. Is it something what you expect? Do you have enough content for keywords that people are interested in? Do they type something unexpected?

What is a good visitor

You should have an idea about people you are targeting. For me my best visitor is small business owner who needs a website and lives in Australia (Sydney would be best). The person should be looking for a solution for website. Now with that in mind I can check stats. I can check where are visitors coming from (geographically). I can see what keywords they use. I can see what pages they visit. Based on that I can decide if traffic I am receiving is quality traffic or not.

Is there something else to track more important then web analytics?

I would say that the most important thing to track is conversion rates. How many people buy, subscribe, apply for a product. I would rather have 10 visitors which email me and enquire about website than 1000 visitors who don’t do anything.

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