You’ve got your site up and running; it looks great, you’re getting enquiries/sales from it etc but how do you know if it could be performing even better?
Get Started
When it comes to analysing your site’s traffic, there are various options available; a lot of web hosts provide free statistics software for this purpose as part of the hosting package, but one of the best free tools (in my humble opinion!) is Google Analytics. It is easy to set up and gives you access to some really useful visitor statistics.
To get started, go to www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for your free account (you may already have an existing google account through gmail; if so, you can use this account to log in).
Once you’ve set up the account, follow the rest of the on screen instructions to set up the website that you want analysing. It basically involves copying and pasting some generated code into your website. You will need the ftp details for your website to do this; if in doubt, ask your web developer.
A common mistake I see is people only pasting the code into the home page of their site. The code needs to be put into every page that you want to analyse.
And that’s it, your done; it really is that easy!
Analyse!
Once Google has started to receive data from your site (this can take a few hours), you are able to see what your visitors are getting up to. The amount of information that you want to see is entirely up to you. You might only be interested in how many visitors your site is getting but to concentrate on this alone would be missing the whole point of analytics.
With analytics set up, you can use it to check any/all of the following:
- Where your visitors are coming from i.e direct, via referring sites or through search engines.
- Which search engines people are using to find your site.
- The most popular keywords people use to find your site on the search engines.
- The most common landing pages.
- Your bounce rate (how many people visit only one page and then leave).
- The routes that visitors take through your site.
- The most common exit pages (where people leave your site from). If visitors are leaving your site from a certain page every time, that page needs looking at!
- The average time spent on your site.
- The average number of pages per visit.
More
There are lots more besides these. A particularly useful feature for any ecommerce business is to set ‘goals’ that you want your visitors to reach i.e. the checkout page. You can then set up ‘funnels’ of expected routes that your customers will take to reach that goal. By seeing where/on which page your visitors are most commonly dropping out of the ‘funnel’ you can start to improve the checkout process and increase your conversion rate.
If you haven’t bothered with analytics before, why not give it a try?
But be warned, it can be very addictive!
If you’re not sure how to install the analytics code, I’m more than happy to help you out; just contact me through the form here
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