Nothing is worse than expecting positive results when you operate a website without monitoring traffic.  Think of it as walking through a pitch-black room in the dead of night with a blindfold; you’ll end up running into furniture, tripping over your kids’ toys, and (overall) not reach your destination in a reasonable time.  In other words, nothing good can come out of running a business site without site statistics.  No matter the tool(s) that you use to obtain the stats, there are 4 primary figures that are significantly important to analyze and track.

Length of Stay

As a true measure of quality content and overall site design, tracking the length of a visitor’s stay is an outstanding source of information.  If your visitors are spending less than 30 seconds on your site, it means they have not taken the next step to become a client for one of the following reasons: (1) the content you provided was lack-luster and not valuable to them (2) site design detoured them from pursuing further, (3) site layout was too difficult to navigate and find what they wanted, or (4) there wasn’t a lead capture form or a reason for them to submit their information.

If you happen to see that your site’s average length of stay starts to drop (or never rises above that 30 second range), you need to act fast because your online reputation is truly at stake.  Remember that quality content is key, and that your site needs to include some form of interaction and value to your target audience.

Continuously analyzing this information will allow you to keep a constant pulse of your visitor interest and content relevancy.

Source of Traffic

Measuring the sources of your site traffic is extraordinarily important as it indicates the search engine optimization efforts as well as the link building, e-mail, and print marketing campaigns which feature your site.  Keep in mind that search engine optimization (both local and global) take time to increase site traffic, but if you do not see traffic driven from search engines within 4 to 6 months then it’s time to re-evaluate the campaign.  The same holds true for e-mail campaigns and link-building strategies – allow a few months to see a change and react.

Pages Visited

While measuring the average site time and source of traffic is tremendously important, analyzing the pages visited in a stay is even more important.  In other words, if a site visitor merely lands on the home page and then clicks to get out of the site (even if they stayed for 2 minutes on that home page), there is no feeling of loyalty built which does not help conversion rating.

Analyzing pages visited can also help determine if the content you have on your site is directional and engaging.  If the content does not have both of those characteristics then the sub-pages of your site will feel the impact.  Keep a close eye on these statistics and make the necessary changes as soon as possible to direct people to take action on your site.

In summary, tracking site statistics is one of the most important tasks that can be done for your business and online reputation.  If you need assistance with tracking and analyzing the statistics, don’t hesitate to contact IMPACT today.

Need Help?

If inbound marketing and website design are something that you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.

Sources:
“The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing”-E-Book
SlideShare.net
Image Source: HubSpot, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing”, E-Marketer.com