Over 20% of businesses don’t track how their web sites are used – don’t be one of them!

Does your web site generate the number of visitors or sales you expected? Do you know how many visitors are landing on your web site? Do you know where visitors come from when they arrive at your website? Or where they go when they leave? Do you know what your visitors do on your site and which pages generate the most interest? Do you know which of your marketing campaigns generates the best return on investment from your web site? Without this information it is almost impossible to get the best results from your website.

A web analytics manager is essential to getting the most from your web site

An online web analytics manager  is the easiest and most accurate way to learn about visitors and what they do on your web site. Web analytic software takes raw data and turns it into structured information in the form of reports. The web analytics manager will provide you with basic information about the number of visitors to your site, where they came from and what they did on your site. Some web hosting companies will provide you with a basic web analytics manager as part of your web site package, or more sophisticated ones can be purchased as an add-on feature. If your hosting company provides this service, it is easy to track your web site usage from within your web site account. Alternatively, there are stand alone packages you can find on the Internet that will enable you to add some code to your web pages and monitor traffic from a separate web analytics web site.

Here are five key things you should be tracking on your web site.

1. How many visitors are coming to site? You can get a good feel for the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by tracking whether the number of visitors is increasing or decreasing. Looking at the percentage of new versus returning visitors will tell you how useful or “sticky” your web site is. If everyone is a new visitor, you could be wasting a lot of marketing resource to attract people who will never return to your site.

2.  How do visitors find your site? If you have submitted your site to search engines, and done a good job of search engine optimization, you will probably find that a lot of your visitors are coming from search engines. However, you may find that there are a number of other sites, some that you didn’t even know about, that are sending you significant amounts of traffic! If so, cultivate these links and try to find other similar sites than might be willing to link to you. By creating individual landing pages for each promotional campaign, you can also measure the effectiveness of promotional campaigns, press releases and affiliate/partner programs. You can even generate separate advertising reports to measure the success of individual ad campaigns.

It is also important to look at the keywords people typed into the search engine to find you; this can provide excellent insight into what attracts people to your web site. You may find some unexpected keywords, or even misspellings, that people are using to find you. If this is the case, you can adjust your marketing campaigns to target these keywords.

3. Where do visitors go after they leave your site? This is important, especially if they didn’t interact with your site by buying, or signing up for something. Look at the places they are going after they leave your site, and try to determine what those sites offer that yours doesn’t.

4. What pages do your visitors look at? If find that visitors only view one or two pages, or even worse, arrive and then leave on the same page, there could be a number of problems with your web site or your marketing. Think about how interesting the landing page is; does it have excellent content and a way to draw people into the site? Is your site loading too slowly?  If you have this problem, you are immediately losing a large percentage of your visitors. If you are using online or Pay-per-click advertising, be absolutely sure that your advertising message is appropriate to the page visitors land on. Also, check for click fraud (link to click fraud article); a high ratio of single page visits could be from artificial clicks.

If you find that certain pages are particularly attractive to visitors, try creating some online marketing campaigns that use keywords mentioned on those pages, and direct traffic to those pages, rather than your home page.

5. What is your conversion rate? Converting Web site visitors into customers is the most important but often neglected aspect of Internet marketing. A Web Analytics manager can help you test the effectiveness of your sales checkout by letting you test different messages and formats to find out which is the most effective at converting prospects into customers. It can also help you remove or modify pages that have a high exit rate. By measuring the number of visitors to your site, looking at what route they take through your site and the percentage that convert, you can optimize your entire sales process.

A good web analytics program can provide you with many more useful information points about your visitors. While the one’s discussed here are important, it is worth spending some time to fully understand your analytic manager – it can help you in more ways than one!