Understand Visitors Numbers
You want to know how many people visit your site each day/week/month. You want to know what times of the day they visit and their geographic location. Hopefully, if you’re a bit more curious you’ll want to know what type of device your site visitors are using such as an iPad, a mobile phone or desktop computer.
Understanding visitor traffic is fundamental to understanding the opportunity you have to inform or influence them.
Monitor Onsite Behaviour
What do people do when they arrive at your site? Do they bounce without doing anything, or do they look around? Do they navigate a couple of pages or several? Is there a common theme to the content they browse? Are there pages where visitors spend a lot of time and equally are there pages that have a high exit rate? How many people add products to their shopping basket or cart? what proportion of shoppers abandon their basket before completing checkout? Are they searching for other products and pages? What are the top search terms used?
Measure Conversions
Conversions are actions you want visitors to take on your site or paths you want visitors to follow during their visit. Conversions are crucial to measuring how successful (or otherwise!) your site is at meeting your goals (see ‘Considerations’ above). For instance are visitors watching your explainer video? Do they download that article or eBook you spent so much time building? Are they following the conversion path you have designed, leading them towards completing a contact form or signing up to your email newsletter?
Measuring conversions allows you to track your websites contribution to your business objectives, commonly represented by performance indicators.
Assess Campaign Performance
Chances are you are spending money on advertising or marketing campaigns to raise brand awareness or generate new customer leads. These campaigns could be SEO activity or pay-per-click Ads, links from affiliate or partner sites, social media or even offline media such as magazines or conferences. Whichever channels you use you want will likely want to know how effective these various campaigns are at generating traffic to your site, specifically the right traffic to your site.
Improve & Optimize Your Website
If you don’t measure performance you can’t improve or optimise your website. You’ll likely make decisions around what marketing activity to undertake based on previous experience and gut feelings and perhaps worse, just because others are doing so and you feel like you should (e.g. social media). Web Analytics will provide you with the data to analyse return on investment for campaigns, perform attribution modelling, segment your customers and review product/service fit.
Source: Netconnective
