Analytics and Traffic Monitoring for Website Marketing

Website Analytics is the only way to truly judge the success of your online marketing efforts. With Website Analytics, you will be able to see how much traffic your website gets, how the traffic is finding your website, where the visitors are located geographically, how many visitors are unique versus return visitors, which pages the visitors are viewing, how long they are on your site, which keywords are driving the traffic to your site, and much more. Perhaps the most effective and easy to use tool can give you very detailed information about how your website is performing.

How to Use Website Analytics

Website Analytics software is available from a wide range of sources. The most popular is Google Analytics because it is available for free. StatAnalytics and Woopra are other examples of Web Analytics programs. Hit Counters are also very popular. Hit counters measure how many hits your website gets and some display this information on your webpage. Most hit counters are limited and less accurate with the information they provide to a user. Usually, setting up Web Analytics on your website is as simple as copying and pasting a few lines of code onto each page of your website. While most Web Analytics programs update the data on a daily basis; there are also more complex forms of Web Analytics that provide results in real time. Once Web Analytics has been installed on your website, you will be able to access detailed reports either online or through a software program that is installed on your computer. With Google Analytics, the reports are accessed online through the user’s Google Account.

What Kind of Statistics are Provided?

Website Analytics reports can be extremely detailed. The information provided in these reports can be useful and meaningful to business owners and webmasters. Some of the most useful statistics include custom queries, traffic sources, map overlay, content, and visitors overview. The information provided in these reports can display very useful data, including:

Site Usage Statistics

Visits

– How many visits or “hits” your website has received during a specific timeframe.

Pageviews

– How many times different pages have been viewed.

Pages/Visit

– The average of how many pages are viewed during a single visit.

Bounce Rate

– Percentage of how many visitors leave or “bounce” from the site after only viewing a single page.

Average Time on Site

– The average of how much time is spent on the site during a single visit.

% New Visits

– Percentage of how many visitors are visiting the site for the first time.

Visitors Overview – A detailed report about the visitors to your website.

Absolute Unique Visitors

– The most important statistic of all. Shows how many unique visitors have visited your website during a specific period of time. This statistic is the true measurement of how successful your website is.

Browser

– Report that shows how many visits are from users using different web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Also shows percentages of visits for each browser.

Connection Speed

– Report that shows how many visits have different connection speeds, such as Cable, DSL, T1, and Dialup. Also shows percentages of visits that are using each connection speed.

Benchmarking

– Shows how the statistics of your site compared to other sites in your industry.

Map Overlay

– Shows where the visitors are located geographically. This statistic is very important because it shows how many visitors are local.

Visitor Loyalty

– Percentage of how many visitors have visited the site one time, two times, three times, and so on.

Traffic Sources– A detailed report of how the traffic came to your website.

Direct Traffic

– Shows how many visits came from users who typed your URL directly into the browser.

Referring Sites

– Shows how many visits came from users who clicked a link to your website from another site. Also shows percentages of how many visits each referring site has sent to your website.

Search Engines

– Percentage of how many visits came from a user who found your site through a search engine. Also shows a percentage of how much traffic each specific search engine has sent to your site.

Keywords

– Shows all of the keywords that visitors have used to find your website through a search engine.

Content Overview

– A detailed report of which pages are being viewed by the visitors.

Unique Views

– How many unique pageviews your site has received.

Pages

– Shows the number of visits that each specific page of your website has received.

Navigation Analysis

– Shows how many times, each of the links on your website have been clicked.

Entrance Paths

– Shows how the visits have arrived at each specific page and which links on your site have brought visitors to each page.

Entrance Sources

– Shows the sources of how many pages each source has sent to your website.

Click Patterns

– Shows how many clicks each internal link on your site has generated.

Custom Queries – Detailed Reports that provide different combinations of all of the above statistics.

With Custom Queries, you can see very detailed information about user activity and your website. If you look at a report of any of the above statistics, you can narrow it down to a query and see more detailed information. For example, by viewing the Map Overlay, you can see that most of your traffic has come from users in a specific State or City, you can click on that State or City and see more detailed information. For example, if you have received 400 visits from Dallas, TX, you can click on Texas, and then click on Dallas and the Web Analytics will show you a custom query of all visits from users in the Dallas, TX area. From there, you can get much more detailed using custom queries. You can select any of the above statistics, like “keywords” and the Web Analytics report will show out of all the visitor from Dallas, which keywords were used to find your website. Another example of a custom query would be if you select Content Overview and the report will show you which pages of your website are most popular. For example, if the “Services” page of your website is the second most popular page, you can click on that page and then see the average time on page for that specific page and compare it to the average time on page for other pages of your website. These custom queries allow users to keep track of very important details, if a certain page has a lower average time on site, the business owner or webmaster may determine that the page needs more interesting content to keep the visitors attention.