Most website hosts now offer you statistics and data that can help you keep track of how your website is doing.
It is recommended that you also avail yourself of the free site report that your host offers you, like Google Analytics.
When you already get site reports, make sure you get them on a regular basis.
Having a pre-determined interval between site reports is very important to see how your site is doing vis a vis the constant shifts happening to your niche and to the market category you belong to.
Most analytics provide you with a basic set of data that includes:
- Number of hits: The total number of site visitors at any given time or of a particular period.
- Geographic segmentation of visitors
- Email reports
- Comments tracking
However, knowing how many people have visited your site or which part of the world they belong to are not enough to gage the performance of your website compared to others in your category.
The data you are given will remain a bunch of numbers and charts unless you integrate all the figures and mine the necessary information you can use to improve your website’s performance.
Below are the two most important data to use and analyze:
1. Unique visitors
No matter how high your hits go, it will not tell you if these visitors have taken in the content of your website. It only tells you that people have come. For all you know, all these hits could have been generated by your 3 best friends who keep visiting your site.
Instead of obsessing about total hits, it is more important to focus on knowing how many unique visitors you site has. This will tell you how many different individuals know of your content and how often each of them returns.
If the number dwindles over time, it could mean that you’re website is not optimized for the right niche. You might want to look at tweaking your content or design.
On the other hand, if the same visitors keep returning to your site, you could be on the right track. Your next step is to find a way to expand your loyal base.
2. Time spent per page, per visitor
Now that you have your desired number of unique visitors, you can track which pages of your site they visit the most. More than that, you should also track how much time they spend on your pages.
If your visitors spend a lot of time on a page with content you think is valuable, and then replicate your optimization techniques for other pages, so that visitors will find that every page is important. Be careful however of replicating content. You site could get boring and you end up losing visitors. Find out what’s important to them.
On the other hand, if visitors spend a lot of time on pages that you don’t think is important, then maybe you need to do a little rethinking. They’re lingering on those pages for a reason. Could it be the pictures? Are the fonts on that page easier to read? Test each element of those pages on the less popular pages to figure out which attracts visitors.
Great post!
The stats that I receive are useful but a little overwhelming at times. In my line of work I can tell from a few headline numbers if something is worth investing in or not.
It is very useful to have a pointer to web stats and the ones that are the most relevant. I particularly like you suggestion on pages that are less interesting achieving more user times through pics and font etc. – and trying different methods out.
I will be saving this post.
Hi Guy,
I am an ex management accountant and know a thing about how to “baffle people with bullshit” when it comes to numbers, however we all know that you only really need certain types of information to make decisions. (that’s why “executive summaries” exist)
Its the same with web stats.
I not only use web stats to gauge my traffic and the behaviour of my visitors but they play an important part in my advertising budget decisions because I will also look at where people are coming from.
For example, if I paid some money to have an ad on a portal and that portal was charging me a fortune each month to only refer a small amount of visitors, I would need to think about whether its worth paying money to that portal.
(If you are using adwords, this is why google offer free anayltics and great tracking software so they can justify the spend to you!)
Okay, sure, I would also need to decide if there was a special seo reason as to why I was advertising on the portal such as the PR or backlinks and relevance, but hey I could get all nerdy and scientific about it, but I wont.
Its really important not to get carried away “too much” with all the different statistics that are available.
A web sites success is really measured by the amount of unique visitors number because from the unique visitors you can roughly work out the conversion rates.
I have a couple of other sites and can, pretty much like clockwork know what my conversion rates are.