What to Look for in Your Web Stats

Posted: December 30, 2007

Most webmasters are usually analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Web Trends, or ClickTracks to measure the traffic to their websites. But what information is the most useful? The following are a few basic tips to follow:

1. The number of visits is important and is best looked at over a monthly basis. You can also segment the number of visitors into time ranges based on campaigns you might be running.
2. Determining where your traffic is coming from can be found through the referrers. The list of referrers shows which websites visits reach your site from. Additionally, looking at the bounce rate of each can determine how valuable one referrer is compared with another.
3. Studying the keywords that users type into search engines to reach your site can help you tweak the content on your website. If you see a keyword that occasionally appears on the list, that could be a good indicator to start paying a bit more attention to that word.
4. Use page views to determine which pages of your website are the most or least popular. Why are the least popular pages not visited often? Is it because they are hard to find or are they not relevant to your site?
5. Track a few basic stats monthly such as visits, pageviews, and pageviews per visit for the entire website. This will give an indication how your site is performing overtime and may show seasonal trends which where unexpected.

These are just a few tips and there are many other things to look at with your web analytics software including geographic information, network information, and much more. However, sticking with the basics can help improve your site traffic with even the smallest of changes.

Posted in Web Analytics