Who are your customers? Who’s coming to your site and how are they getting there? How many of them are purchasing your products or services? How do you know?
If you don’t use web analytics to track the behavior of visitors to and on your site, then you won’t know the answer to any of these questions! If you don’t know the answers, then you won’t know if you need to change your marketing strategy, make changes to your products or services, or rearrange the content and pages on your site. In order to know what is effective and what isn’t, you have to analyze your traffic.
You may be asking yourself, “How do I analyze my traffic?”. Well, there are a few different ways you could go about this. The best way is through tracking software. In my experience, the absolute best way to get the most detailed key information about your site’s traffic is Google Analytics. Not to mention, it’s also free. One of the most important pieces of information is the ‘bounce rate’. That’s when a visitor comes to a page of your site and doesn’t interact or explore further before leaving. If most of your visitors are bouncing right off your site, it doesn’t matter if you’re getting 10,000 visitors a day. What you need is targeted traffic, visitors who land on your site and stay there, exploring what you have to offer.
You may find that your bounce rate on one page of your site is extremely high, while other pages exhibit a lower rank. Now, not only do you know that this is happening, but you know exactly where it’s happening and you can fix that page so that it entices people to stay.
The next thing that Google Analytics can do for you is check out where your visitors are coming from. How many typed in your address directly? How many came through a link on a search engine? How many linked to you through another site? You may be paying for advertising on a site that isn’t creating any traffic for you. Now you know and you can cancel that advertising subscription and put your money to better use. You may see that you are getting a high amount of traffic from another site. Perhaps you will choose to target similar sites for backlinks in hopes of getting the same results.
Where do your visitors go once they get to your site? Are they landing on the pages you want them to? Are they filling out your forms or purchasing products/services? How many are new visitors and how many have been to your site before? It is with this information that you will be able to use web analytics to further figure out what it is that your site needs in order to convert visitors into buyers. This is called a conversion rate, the percentage of visitors to your site who make a purchase or subscribe to your service. This is critical in building a successful website for your business. In fact, it is the entire point of web analytics and the reason for carefully and accurately tracking your visitor’s activities: to raise your conversion rate as much as possible.
Improving your conversion rate starts with tracking and web analytics. Without the accurate information, you cannot analyze the activities of your visitors. When you analyze the activities of your visitors and compare the results to what you would like to see happen on your site, page by page, then you can make changes to achieve those goals. After you make changes, check your numbers and use web analytics again to figure out what needs to be changed next. In this way, you can stop wasting your time and money on advertising and SEO techniques that aren’t drawing or maintaining traffic and stick to what works, targeting your traffic and turning visitors into repeat customers.
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- Three Requirements To Extract Value From A Web Analytics Tool #Analytics (rezania2013.wordpress.com)
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