Entries Tagged 'Analytics' ↓

As a continuation on my series of blog posts describing what small business and entrepreneurs can do to improve their Internet presence, I am going to discuss in this post how to measures the traffic to ones website.  Also, before starting any initiative to increase traffic to your website it’s important to be able to measure the effectiveness of each approach. 

Like the saying goes… “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” – not sure who actually said that?

In order to measure the effectiveness of your site and any initiatives to increase traffic, I recommend implementing a web analytics tool on your site.  A web analytics tool allows you measure the traffic that to your website, and some of the important metrics one would look at are:

• Visitors and Location – how many total/new visitors you are getting on your site, and where the visitors are coming from geographically.
• Content Overview – tracks what pages on your website are being viewed.
• Bounce Rate – the percentage of visitors that leave your site right without looking at other pages on your site.
• Traffic Sources – the sources of traffic to your site, this is measured in direct traffic, referring sites and search engines.

I believe the first two metrics are self explanatory in terms of their  value.  The Bounce Rate metric is important because it indicates, if the percentage is high, that your website may not be that interesting to the visitors.  The last metric Traffic Sources is very important, especially if you have implemented some social media strategies (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to increase traffic to your site.  Also, the search engine measurement determine who many visitors are find your site through services like Google, Yahoo, etc.

The most widely analytics tool, and the one I use personally, is Google Analytics.  It is free service from Google which is not terribly difficult to setup and configure on your sites. Basically what happens is that you enter the address of your site in Google Analytics, and then it give you a few lines of codes that you copy/paste into each of your web pages. I know, sure it sounds simple, but unless you are comfortable with updating your web pages you may want help in setting this up.

After a few hours Google Analytics will start collecting data about the traffic and visitors to your website.  Then you can start implementing the various strategies and actually measure and see which ones are working for you.  Good luck and if you need any help don’t hesitate to contact ThreeGears!