It is surprising how many people commission a website, spend good money and time on it, then leave it to stagnate the minute it has been launched. For many businesses, their website is their most powerful marketing tool yet they spend little or no time analysing its performance.
One simple way to correct this is to install Google Analytics on your site. It’s a two-minute job for your developer to set this up but it will provide you with masses of rich information on how visitors are finding and interacting with your site. Here are just three ways it will help you to optimise your site.
Firstly, the most basic function of Google Analytics is to tell you how many people are visiting your site. But beyond simply counting the number of people to land on your site, Analytics will tell you how long people spend on each page, which pages are the most popular, and crucially which pages tend to drive people away from your site. So if you can identify which pages are turning people away, you can address the problems with those pages and encourage visitors to stay on your site longer.
Secondly, Analytics will provide information on how people are finding your site. So you’ll get detailed data on the most popular links directing visitors to your site, allowing you to see how successful your latest promotion on Facebook has been, for example, or whether that expensive online ad has been worthwhile. It also allows you to analyse the search terms that people have used to find your site. You can use this data to re-write content and ensure that people can find you.
And finally, Analytics lets you set and measure specific goals on your site. For instance, if you have an online shop, you can measure how often a visitor actually buys a product (called the ‘conversion rate’). As you continue to develop your site you can track how successful the changes have been by comparing the conversion rate before and after the change. But you don’t need to be running a shop to track conversion rates. If the goal of your site is simply to get new customers to contact you, you can measure how often visitors hit the submit button on the contact form. Again, you can use this figure to measure the effectiveness of improvements to your site.
These are just three ways that Google Analytics can help you to get more from your website. Your site should be an ongoing project. Don’t let it rot – measure how people are using it and update it to make it work better.
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this is interesting but how does being able to count how many hits you get help you get more hits?
Thanks for your comment, sbiddulph. It’s more than just counting – you can analyse how people are finding your site via search engines or from links on other sites. When you know this kind of information you can start to improve the ways you promote your site. You can also analyse the data to identify the search terms that people are using to get to your site and then modify your site content to make yourself more ‘findable’.
Hope this helps.
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