What should I be measuring?

When you first start with Web Analytics you could find yourself wading into a minefield of graphs, charts, and terminology. Web Analytics tools are getting increasingly sophisticated (our own analytics suite ProspectWOW can even provide B2B users with the names, companies, job titles and email addresses of their website visitors) and the amount of information they can produce is astounding. But don’t be overwhelmed, we have created this quick guide to web analytics of the primary measures all sites should be monitoring.

Visitors

The most basic measure of a sites success is how many visitors your site gets. It is no use having a site with great content or a well-designed online store if no one is visiting it. Measuring the number of visitors can indicate how well your site, or certain pages on your site are performing.

Bounce rate

Bounce rates indicate how many people arrive on your page, realise it’s not where they wanted to be, and leave straight away. It is unrealistic to assume that every person who visits your site is interested in your content and wants to hang around on your page. However, a low bounce rate can indicate that your site is appearing in search results for the right reasons and that your site is attractive enough to hold a visitor’s attention.

Visitor journey

Monitoring how your visitors go through your site can be extremely interesting. On ProspectSoft’s own website we find a lot of visitors heading to our page on Integration from the homepage. This identifies the page as being important to our visitors therefore making it a priority for us to focus on.

Search terms

We’ve done plenty of blogs on SEO. It’s an essential part of modern business. If you can see the search terms that your site is being found for through your analytics suite it will indicate 2 things:

1. The behaviour of customer finding your site i.e. What they are looking for to find you. This will indicate if the people going to your site are there for the right reasons. If they are not it is probably worth adapting your content and SEO strategy.
2. The behaviour of the search engine i.e. What your site is being found for. Search engines will put forward sites that they feel are most relevant to the searchers query. If your site is being put forward for irrelevant search queries then, as above, it is probably worth adapting your content and SEO strategy.

Traffic sources

Where your visitors are coming from can indicate areas of your marketing efforts that may need adjusting or improving. If you are sending out a monthly email but are not seeing an increase in visitors to your site then you may want to make the links in your email clearer, or try changing the elements of your email to make sure more people are reading it. If you have people visiting your site from organic searches then an SEO strategy could ensure that you get more visitors in this way.

These are just the very basic ways you can use Web Analytics to enhance your business. ProspectWOW analytics software allows you to go far beyond this; converting your website visitors into real sales opportunities.