Web analytics programs are tools to gather and interpret raw usage data from visitors on your site.  Tracking these metrics will help you find where your traffic comes from, where they go on your site, where they leave, how long they stay and where they go after leaving your site.  Knowing how your site is being used is crucial to determining what it is doing well and what needs to be refined to make it more effective.

Don’t fly blind.  Analytics will keep you on track.

With the technical aspects aside, the core idea behind website analytics, is - in a word -  accountability.  Web analytics provides you with the data to interpret your website traffic and be able to understand how your website is used, and how it is performing with your visitors.  You need to know more about who goes on your website to find where the holes in your online marketing campaign are, which will help you know what to fix.  Assuming you already know who is on your site and what they are interested in without data to back it up will make you overlook important things to streamline your site.

Understanding how to interpret data, knowing which metrics to look for will help you make real-time, informed decisions regarding your website.  The web is a very fluid and dynamic environment and no website, even a newly designed one, is guaranteed to perform well without regular maintenance and assessment.

Understand limitations to draw more accurate conclusions.

When reading your analytics reports, it is very important to note that all analytics programs interpret data based on certain assumptions.  For example, something you might think is an obvious key metric, such as the number of unique visitors, is not an exact count.  The program will not distinguish between search engine spiders crawling your site, proxy servers, unique human visitors or several people visiting the site off the same LAN.  The program also assumes how long a ‘visit’ is, which can vary.

This is not to say that these numbers are inaccurate or misleading, or even that these assumptions are either right or wrong - they are just that: assumptions.  It is the nature of the beast.  Furthermore, how you interpret your user data should be taken at a case by case basis, and certain patterns of use cannot be broadly summarized as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.   This does not mean you should discount your unique visitors, time spent per site and average page-views per user data; it is important to understand the limitations in analytics programs will help you draw better conclusions from their reports.

Bounce Rate: The most important metric.

Let me introduce you to your most important metric: the ‘bounce rate’.   Think of the bounce rate the measure of your user’s assessment of your relevance.  This wonderful metric shows you how many of your visitors deemed your site to be irrelevant and immediately left.  More specifically, it can be applied to help you isolate where your good traffic and bad traffic is coming from.  An average bounce rate should be between 40% to 60% - the lower the better.  Bear in mind, you cannot convince everyone who makes it to your site to stay, so don’t sweat it if it isn’t down in the single digits.

Where this metric becomes especially powerful as a diagnostic tool is when you check the bounce rate on your entry pages.  It is important to remember that a lot of visitors will get to your site through pages other than your home page (which underscores the necessity of excellent and intuitive navigation on every page of your site, but I digress).  Seeing what traffic you get from where on which pages and being able to assess the percentage of your visitors who found your site relevant will go a long way to helping you in your landing page optimization and assessing which markets yield interested visitors.

The bounce rate should also be applied to Google Adwords campaigns.  You can track the bounce rates of visitors that get to your sites from various keywords in order to see which ones are giving you your best traffic and which ones are generating bad leads and wasting your money.  This will help you assess if you are bidding on the right or wrong keywords.  Conversely, you may also find, like one of my clients did, that she was getting lots of traffic from a keyword she had not anticipated and based on this information, she increased her product offerings for that keyword.

Analytics affects usability.

It is easy to assume certain things about your visitors, but without solid data, this can cause countless problems with your site’s usability.  For example, you cannot necessarily assume all your visitors are on broadband connections with high resolution monitors (especially if you are a B2C company), but this can easily not be the case.  How would you know?  Using a program like Google analytics will track helpful metrics such as geographic locations of your traffic (via revers IP lookup), the browsers your visitors use, their screen resolution, their connection speed and much more.  These will help you make sure your site is designed and optimized for your viewers.

Understanding how people use your website is paramount to the success of your online marketing campaign.  I would recommend glancing over your statistics every week or so to check for anomalies.  Once a month, dig deep into your analytics data to get a list of improvements for the next month and to assess the progress on last month’s list.  The benefit of accountability on your site and online marketing campaign only comes from interpreting and applying the data.

Leave a comment if this was helpful or if you want to know a little more about how to use your analytics data.  I’m here to help!