Tracking you website traffic – Analytics 101

If your business has a website, you want to be tracking every person who visits it an analysing their behaviour. By doing this you will gain valuable information about your site – what works, what does not, and what strategies result in the highest conversion rates. SEO consulting can be highly beneficial to your business because using the analytics can result in high page ranking. There are a whole range of tracking and analytics tutorials available on the web, but a lot of the terminology is confusing so here is the low down.

 

Page Views: Very raw data that forms the basis of all your analytics. It is an outline of how many times your page has been viewed and includes click backs and refreshed pages.

Unique Page Views: A slightly more polished version of page views. When someone comes to your site, if they are only counted on each page once, even if they refresh it or click back through multiple times.

Frequently Visited Pages: Basically, your most popular pages. This is useful to know because you can see what content your visitors are most interested in.

Visitors: The people you want to know inside out and back to front. They are the users and hopefully customers of your website. It is important to have a standard of measurement for your visitors, like their IP address or a cookie; the data will not be as useful.

Unique Visitors: These are the visitors who have visited once during a specific time frame – a day, a week or a month, it is up to you and the analytics program that you use.

Page Views Per Visit: How many of you pages people visit before they click out. It is important to know where your most inquisitive visitors are coming from and it is essential to know how long they stay. If people are clicking through to your home page and clicking out straight away, there is a problem with your page. Review the design and content.

Time Per Visit: Fairly straightforward. Keep in mind that you might get anomalies – if there is one person who is on your site for 72 minutes while the average is 3:45 minutes, they are probably walked away from their PC for something.

Geographic Location: A lot of programs will let you track where your visitors are coming from, however, this can be highly inaccurate as many IP addresses are shared. This is becoming more precise with new developments.

Referring URL: This will tell you how a person came to your site – through a link on another website, a search engine results list or through an advertisement. One of the good things about this is you can contact other websites who are linking to you and start to build relationships with the ones you like.

On Page Links Clicked: What links on your site your visitors click. If you know what information is the most popular, you can expand on that rather than spreading your energies out across less rewarding content.

Click Through Rate: The number of impressions divided by the number of clicks. In other words, the number of times your ad is shown divided by the number of times someone follows the ad to your website.

As you can see, SEO consulting has a much specialized branch of language. Do not be daunted, it is worth getting to know the ins and outs of these things if you want a high page ranking on search engine results lists. Website analytics programs are fantastic ways of collecting data that can help you improve your website.