The importance of your business’ website has never been as great as it is today. In fact, it’s very likely that the first contact potential customers will have with your business will be through your website. Because of this, it is paramount that you create a flawless website that is informative and eye catching while remaining highly functional and fast loading. One of the best ways to you can ensure that your website is providing your customers with the optimum experience and is actually helping your company is by analyzing your website stats.
What Stats to Look For
For novices, it can be difficult to understand what stats should be examined and what each one of these stats means.
Unique Visits
This is one of the easiest metrics to understand as each unique visit counts as one person who has visited your site. This number can easily give you a baseline for you to see the traffic your website is generating for your company.
Average Duration of Visit
This measurement shows you exactly how long a visitor remained on your website before moving on to other things. Web surfers are notoriously fickle and can easily be distracted, so the higher this average is, the better it is for your site.
Bounce Rate
This percentage represents the number of people that visit your site but bounce away before visiting other pages on your site. You want your site to catch the attention of your visitors so the lower the bounce rate the better.
Conversion Rate
For business owners this number is one of the most important when tracking the success of your site. This rate shows how many potential customers became actual customers for your business by buying something online from your shop or by signing up to receive more information from you.
Are These Figures Truly Important?
Many business owners often wonder if these figures really do matter to their business. In truth, they most certainly do. They measure how good your performance is based on the habits of the visitors to your site. Think about it. If a visitor hits one of your pages and after only a few seconds leaves for other sites they have learned very little about your business or what you offer. In the jargon of the trade, it isn’t “sticky”. For your website to be effective, you need to grow your traffic and keep that traffic on your site so they can learn more about your business, so that you can transform them from just a visitor to a customer.
How Often Should You Examine Your Stats?
While watching your website’s stats isn’t something you necessarily have to do each and every day, it should become a regular part of your work week going forward and should be monitored regularly enough to catch any changes quickly. Search engines regularly change their algorithms and these changes can negatively impact your traffic so it is important to examine your traffic on a regular basis and be prepared to adapt your websites design and performance based on the traffic results. The true obsessive is checking a couple of times a day, and probably learning a lot in the process
Your website stats will offer you great insight into how your website is performing so you can make the necessary changes needed in order to create the perfect marketing tool for your business. Tracking your stats consistently over a long period of time can also give you key information on how your company is performing online year round, and can help you tailor an ever more perfect marketing plan..
