Scrutinise your Web Stats and Gain the Competitive Edge

You’ve invested in setting up a good quality website and you are doing the right thing by blogging, publishing articles and backing up your online strategy with a social media campaign to help boost your online presence.

But how effective are all your efforts? Surprisingly, many people don’t know the answer to this question. Some just about know how many visitors they get to their website every week or month, let alone where those visitors are coming from. And there is a huge amount of useful information available apart from the basic visitor numbers that could really help you get the most out of your website.

If you are guilty of not keeping a close watch over how your website and online campaign are performing then read on to find out what you should know, how you can find it out, and why it will benefit you greatly.

Google Analytics: It’s Free, and Invaluable

Starting with your website, firstly make sure there is some form of reporting tool set up to deliver a thorough report, preferably weekly, on visitor statistics. Google Analytics is the most popular of these tools, and it’s free to use. It delivers an extensive collection of data and insights into the effectiveness of a website. All you need to do is insert some code into your site’s HTML and it will start delivering data within hours. If you’re not sure, ask your website designer to set it up for you. You can login any time via your Google account for a real time slice of what’s happening, and you can also set up a weekly report which lands in your inbox every Monday to show you what’s been going on over the past week.

Google Analytics and other reporting tools show a vast array of information: number of visitors, how they found your site, where they’re from, which browser they’re using, how long they spent on each page, which pages they entered and exited from, the keywords they used to find you, and so much more. And this information is useful in so many ways.

For example, if you find that some of your pages are being viewed more than others, or keep visitors for longer, then you might consider reviewing the content on the ones that aren’t so popular. Maybe you are receiving visitors from a certain geographical area; if so, perhaps you’d like to extend your offline marketing in this region. And if most visitors are using your company’s name as the keyword to find your website, rather than the services or products you are offering, this will probably mean most of them have already heard of you from other sources or could be existing customers, so you may want to run a campaign that focuses on getting new customers. Are your Visitors ‘Bouncing’ off your site?

Perhaps one of the most useful insights is the Bounce Rate. This is shown as a percentage and tells you how many visitors have left your site without visiting any other pages. i.e. they’ve ‘bounced off’, usually because they didn’t think they were in the right place. The higher the percentage, the bigger the issue, and it will need attention. Maybe your website doesn’t have the necessary impact to encourage visitors to stay, perhaps it doesn’t properly explain what you do, or maybe your marketing is attracting the wrong sort of visitors.

It is also important to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, especially if you are investing a large amount of time in them.

Facebook Insights

If you use Facebook, check your Facebook Insights. These show trends such as demographics, user growth and content consumption and they will help you develop your marketing campaign around your Facebook platform. Facebook Insights is a free service and you can access information on how it works via your Insights Dashboard in your account.

The All New Twitter Analytics

With Twitter, it’s always been vitally important to have a tracking mechanism in place to see how well your posted links are serving you. Bit.ly and Hootsuite offer excellent tracking services, but the newly launched Twitter Analytics tool will provide a more in depth insight into how your web content is being shared through Twitter. The tool allows you to see the amount of traffic being sent to your site via Twitter, and measure how well your Tweet button is working.

And it doesn’t stop at social media. Did you know you can add Google Analytics to your blog? And that most of the article websites you post to offer a reporting service on how many views your articles have received?

The Moral of the Story

Put the information that’s available to you to good use. There is a multitude of free ways to find out how your online campaigns are performing, so use them! Act on what you find out, and for sure, you’ll have the edge over the competitors that aren’t bothering to keep track.

Published on: Tuesday, 4th October 2011

Go back