Five Reasons to Use Website Analytics
Using a web analytics package is critical for all small business websites. Unfortunately, most websites are not monitoring their visitors at all. If you don’t know where visitors are getting tripped up, how can you hope to improve your website?.
This article discusses the importance of using an analytics program on your small business website.
Reason #1: Navigation Path Analysis
While your homepage is probably your most viewed page, realize that people will also land on other pages deeper within your site.
Wouldn’t it be nice to see the navigation path visitors take when they first come to your website? You might assume they are taking one path when, in reality, they are taking a very different one that lowers the chance of conversion.
If you don’t know how people move through your website, it will be very difficult to optimize your site to improve visitor experience.
Reason #2: Traffic Referral Monitoring
How do visitors actually find your business website? How much traffic is Google or Yahoo sending your way? Is your online advertising actually driving traffic back to your site?
An analytics package will tell you which sites people were at before coming to yours. In addition, you’ll learn what people typed into the various search engines to find your web site. This information is critical to help you discover what is driving traffic so that you can do more of the things that work and less of things that don’t!
Reason #3: Page Content
Did you just write a great new content article for your site? A good analytics program will show you how often pages get viewed relative to others on your site. You’ll also know exactly how long visitors stayed at a particular page.
This data can help you decide how popular your pages are. If you know which pages your visitors tend to focus on, you can tune any advertising or monetization strategies for increased profits.
Reason #4: Key Performance Indicators
The most important factor for any business website is conversion. By using an analytics program, you’ll be able to set up and watch specific types of performance indicators.
The real power comes from using an analytics package with A/B Split and multivariate testing. By using these two tools together, you will be able to not only check your conversions rates, but test the various page elements that cause higher conversions.
Reason #5: Trend Monitoring
Trend monitoring lets you look at any single performance indicator over time. Seeing how your conversion rates and other indicators change over time will give you quick indication on the overall health of your business.
Trends that are useful to monitor over a long period include:
- Average time on site (i.e., visitor engagement)
- Depth of visit (How many total pages are viewed?)
- Unique visitors
- Repeat visitors
- Bounce rate (# people that leave after viewing only 1 page)
You’ll find a lot of analytics packages available. However, I highly recommend Google Analytics as the program of choice. Google Analytics has been time-tested and has performed very well across many different types of businesses.
How do you install Google Analytics on your business website? It’s quite simple. You simply paste a small piece of tracking code on every single page you wish to check and track. Once you have pasted in the code, Google will verify the installation and start providing you with unique tracking information.
There are also many paid-for analytics programs that have their own advantages and drawbacks. Take the time to research the best package for your needs.
You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. A good analytics program can help identify what needs to be improved. Start monitoring your web visitors as soon as possible and you’ll be well on your way to improving both your site and your profits.
For more information on using analytics in your marketing program, visit the SmallBiz Marketing Tips Website.