Learning how your visitors use your website can be helpful in shaping up your online strategy. What can you learn and how? We will look at a few tips and good practices in this article.
What You Can Learn
Overall Site Traffic
Typical metrics people measure include:
- Unique visitors
- Page views (total and average per visit)
- Average time on site
You want to, of course, compare these numbers with your competitors’. But unless your competitors receive considerable amount of traffic (in which case, you can check their traffic at http://www.complete.com), you might not be able to find out how much traffic your competitors get.
But you can for sure track your own traffic data and look at the trend from month to month. You will be able to see to some extent the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. For example, check to see if your last email newsletter blast had helped bump up the traffic.
Site Content
- Top content
See which pages on your site receives more clicks and longer pageview time. Hopefully that is inline with your marketing strategy. - Click patterns
For most people, the entry page to their websites is the homepage, which often functions as a portal leading to various content pages that are deeper in the site. You might have banners, you might have buttons. But which links do people like to click on? Adding a simple event tracking tag [Google Analytic Event Tracking Guide] to your link URLs will help you get the answer.
Site Visitors
You will not know who came to your site unless you ask people to register and login. But you can still learn a lot from most website usage reports (check with your hosting company on report availability and how to gain access):
- How many of them are new visitors and the bounce rate (people came and left from the first page on your site). Google Analytics offers these data but not every site tracking software does.
- Geolocation of your visitors
- Visitors browser profiles (what percentage of your visitors on PC vs. Mac, on IE vs. Firefox, etc.)
- Visitors network properties (percentage of your visitors on broadband vs. dialups, etc.)
More Advanced
With Google Analytics, you can do much more if you are willing to invest your time and effort:
- Goal conversion
- Customer reports
- Alerts
- Custom tracking variables
(useful for further learning of user behavior on your site)
Google Conversion University offers a series of online tutorials.
Get Started
Many hosting companies offer site usage reports through a control panel. Common software in use includes:
- Awstats
- Weblizer
- Webtrends
Check with your hosting company to find out how to access the reports.
Google Analytics
You can also use Google Analytics, which offers more features compare to many other software. And it’s free. See the Getting Started Guide.