How to Use Web Analytics

Web Analytics Explained by Web Hosting Provider

In your bricks-and-mortar store, you choose which items to offer, what to promote, where and how to display your merchandise, and how to showcase it based on a number of factors, from sales numbers to traffic patterns. With an online store, you have less information about your customers and potential customers — or more, if you have a good web analytics program and know how to use it.

Web analytics programs present data about website traffic, web hosting provider explains:

• Where the visitors are from
• Keywords and external links used to get to the site
• Average number of visitors per page per day
• Numbers of unique visitors and returning visitors
• Visitors' landing pages and exit pages
• Visitors' paths through the site
• Page views per visitor
• How long visitors spend on each page

Each web analytics program is different, and not all provide all of the above. Free and commercial programs are available.

Web analytics can provide a lot of information, perhaps more than you need. To get the most effective use out of web analytics reports, focus on your goals for your site, and study the reports with information that can help you achieve your goals.

Reduce bounce rates

Bounce rate is the ratio of visitors who leave a page or site immediately or shortly after arriving at it. It's usually expressed as a percentage.

Depending on your site, a bounce rate of up to about 30 percent may be fine. Those figures include people who arrived at the site via an irrelevant keyword, those who can see at a glance that your page doesn't have what they're looking for, and those who find what they need on that page. If visitors are staying long enough to read an informational page that doesn't have a call to action, the bounce rate may not be a concern at all.

Do some landing pages that invite visitors to take action have a higher-than-desired bounce rate? If so, look for and change factors that could be driving visitors away:

• A poor first impression caused by an unappealing web design, pop-up ads, background music, or typos
• Pages that don't look good in the visitor's screen resolution or browser or things that don't work for them, such as JavaScript as a requirement to use the site
• Headings, introductions, and content that don't draw visitors in
• Missing or hard-to-find information: product details (including specific details that you may not have thought of), contact information, privacy policy, shipping rates, locations that you ship to
• Missing or non-persuasive call to action
• Non-competitive pricing
• Broken links

Look in your web analytics program at the keywords and backlinks that are bringing visitors to each page. Is each page optimized for the most relevant keywords for that page? Are other sites linking to the right pages at your site? If some keywords and backlinks are more relevant to other pages at your site, link to those pages from the landing page. In addition, optimize each page better for its target keywords, and ask to have backlinks changed when appropriate.

Find out why traffic or conversions are dropping

Web analytics track changes over time, and these changes provide valuable information for you.

If you aren't getting as many visitors via search engines, check which keywords are bringing less traffic than before, and search for those keywords. What sites have moved ahead of you in results for those keywords? How are they optimized? With this information, you can work on regaining your position in search results.

If you aren't getting as many visitors from other sites, look at your backlinks. Did you lose any? Do the sites that still link to you now link to competing sites that may have gained some of the traffic you've lost? Work on getting more quality backlinks, and learn what you can from those competing sites.

With a reduction in conversions, look for changes in the bounce rate as well as any problems at your site that prevent visitors from accessing certain pages or placing orders. Observing what pages aren't being viewed can help identify such problems.

Create more content that your audience will want to read

Web analytics can tell you what your audience is searching for and where they're coming from.

Do the keywords that bring people to your site represent your site content? Optimize your site better for keywords that you have content for, and consider adding content for keywords that are related to your site content. For example, if your site is about types of flooring and you keep getting hits for a type of flooring that you only briefly mention, consider creating a page about that flooring type and optimizing that page for that and related keywords.

The backlinks that send the most traffic to you tell you where those visitors are before they come to your site. Those sites can also give you ideas for more content that's relevant to your visitors. And if it's relevant to visitors from other sites, more webmasters are going to link to it.

Your most popular pages are about topics that will draw more visitors. Add content related to those pages, and link to it from them.

With e-commerce sites, however, more content isn't necessarily better. It's good if it brings more visitors and helps them decide to order from you. But with too many pages to read, visitors can be lost on their way to checkout. Keep the focus tight.

Acquire more backlinks

Look at the sites that are sending you the most traffic, in particular sites where the webmasters decided to link to you without your asking for a backlink. Focus even more on sites whose visitors to your site don't have a high bounce rate.

Those sites have visitors who are interested in your content. Find related sites, and work on getting backlinks from them. This step will be easier if you create more content relevant to visitors from those sites first.

Expand or focus your geographical reach

Observe where your visitors are from. If you want to reach visitors from specific countries, you can see how you're doing with visitors from those countries and tailor some of your content more to them. If you offer a local service, web analytics will tell you how successful you are at reaching a local audience. For both situations, look at the visitors you have from the target area, note what pages they view and what keywords bring them, and work on optimizing content more for them.

Related blog articles

See the following blog categories at this site:

• Keywords
• Links
• SEO and Search Engine Optimization
• Web Design
• Website Content

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