Website Health Check – Analytics

Analytics for website success

Visitor numbers

By looking at the overall number of visitors you can get an idea on how well your website is marketing itself. This can be through traditional print and broadcast media but it’s mainly via search engines, your content and your SEO. Looking at this you can determine which activities are helping and which you need to look at in more detail. For example, if you start adding regular blog posts to your website, seeing what impact this has on the number of visitors will help to show its worth. You can take this a step further by filtering the data to show individual page numbers, you can use this information to see what blog posts are performing the best and look at ways of repeating this in future posts – does having longer posts help, adding additional images, video, topics selected etc.? 

Individual page stats can also help you identify which products or services are attracting visitors; letting you review your business to see if there is the opportunity to shift focus to give your customers more of what they want. For example, if you find a large number of your visitors are looking at a specific product category in your store it would be worth looking at other additional products you could add to this category to help boost sales.

If you find pages that are important but are not getting the visitor numbers you would expect start to review your site as a whole, do you have clear and obvious links to the page? Is it in your main navigation? Could you add calls to action to help draw their attention to it? Once you find a way to improve the stats come into play again, monitor the numbers over a few weeks/months and see if your changes have had an effect.

website visitor numbers

Time spent on page

The stats can also be used to look at the average time users are spending on your pages, this is a good indication of how engaging users are finding the page and if they are actually reading it. If certain pages are capturing their interest more than others it could be worth reviewing them to see why and if you can use lessons learnt to help improve other pages. The opposite is also true, looking for pages that are performing particularly badly will help to identify those that require overhauling.

Other stats such as the bounce rate can also be really useful, this shows the number of users that landed on the page and ‘bounced’ off your site leaving it for something else and is a good indication of if the users found what they wanted or left to look elsewhere. It can also be caused by a lack of calls to action enticing the users to continue into the rest of the website.

Users location and visit time

Location stats can show you where in the world your visitors are coming from, most businesses have a fairly good idea of this already but it’s always worth reviewing as you may be getting visitors from surprising locations.

The same is true of the time people visit the website, you might assume targeting b2b visitors that they are visiting you site during working hours, but you might find that they are visiting during the commute, or while at home catching up on their to-do list. Knowing when they are visiting your website will help influence when updates should be done, other activity such as social media, emailers and even how you write your copy.

Users device

It’s all too easy to take it for granted while working on your website using a lovely big desktop/laptop screen that your visitors will be doing the same, in reality, the average stats show us the mobile visitors make up around 50%. This varies from site to site and between different industries, but your stats will be able to tell you exactly how many of your visitors are on mobile and help you to refocus on mobile experiences for your site as it becomes more important. 

You can then cross-reference the type of visitor with the pages they visited on your website to see what areas you should focus on to give all of your visitors the best possible experience.

Summary

You can see from the examples how powerful your stats can be and how much they could influence your marketing and business strategy. It’s important to remember however, until you have it set up and collecting data you won’t be able to benefit from it – check now if its set up and if not get in touch with your developer to make sure it’s set up as soon as possible.

Reviewing the stats regularly will help you keep on top of your site and give you a good idea on what’s going on, it will also help reassure you that your hard work on your website is paying off.

We have just scratched the surface of what’s possible with your analytics. Getting to know what details your service records by getting to know your control panel will give you much more control over your website. At the end of the day, the best thing to do is dive in and have a play!

Website Health Check Guide

This is part of our Website Health Check guide, the full version with all 10 sections is available to download for free now.

Download FREE Guide
SC Icon

What can we do for you?

Contact us now for a free, no obligation, consultation.