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Where are your website visitors going & what have they downloaded?

Posted in Analytics Website Analysis
September 20th, 2009 by Pete

My stock answer to nearly all website measurement queries is to recommend Google Analytics.
Its easy to install; gives great reports; can plot a sales funnel and so much more. Unbelievably its free!

What is even more unbelievable is the amazing array of Analytics tweaks and custom tracking ‘extensions’.

For example, Analytics doesn’t report a couple of key pieces of info ‘out of the box’ ie

• where do visitors go when they leave your site?
• what has been downloaded from my site?

To answer these questions you would normally add special Analytics scripts to every link etc Tedious!
Good Web Practices has a nifty script that dynamically captures site exits and PDF and other downloads in Analytics – well worth a look.

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Analytics for business people | Referring sites

Posted in Analytics Website Analysis
August 25th, 2009 by Pete

Referring Sites

Because of the important nature of referring traffic this module extends the Traffic Sources Overview to focus explicitly on where referrals are coming from.
referrals

Business Interpretation

Referring websites are just as important to your business as off-line sales referals;

  • They bring prospective clients to your site
  • You are being ‘recommended’ by the referee

    • YellowPages Online and other internet directory sites should also appear in this category if they are being used as part of your online promotion.

    This referral data along with metrics like Pages/Visit will you to evaluate these sources as viable contributors to your business promotion.

    If you don’t recognise the websites referring business to you, then make the effort to establish a relationship with them;you might get even more referrals!

    Analytics for business people

    This is one of a series of articles to help business people extract value from their Analytics reports.

    Got questions about interpreting your Analytics reports?

    Leave me a comment

    Cheers
    Pete

     

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    Analytics for business people | Visits & Site Usage

    Posted in Analytics Website Analysis
    August 25th, 2009 by Pete

    Visits chart

    This chart shows the fundamental web metric, Visits displayed over the report period.

    visits

    Visits should be slowly increasing because you’ve been working hard to get more prospective clients to your website. It is quite normal for traffic to ease during weekends and holiday periods in a business website.

    Site Usage

    Visits

    The number of visitors to the site
    Note this is not a direction correlation with visitors because if one visitor came to the site three times this represents 3 visits.

    PageViews

    The number of times a page was viewed or displayed
    If during a visit, a visitor viewed a particular page 3 times then this represents 3 page views

    Pages/Visit

    The average number of pages viewed in a visit
    This is a key metric as it represents the level of visitor engagement with the site.

    Bounce rate

    Represents the portion of visitors who leave the site immediately after visiting it i.e. they ‘bounce’ straight out of the site

    Average time on site

    Average period of time that visitors spend on the site

    % new visits

    The portion of new visitors to the site

    Business Interpretation

    As with any advertising, the business needs to gain exposure to prospective clients.

    A healthy level of visits is paramount; particularly increasing over time.

    Weekends, public holidays even school holidays can impact website visits

    A good portion of new visitors who represent new prospective clients is also key.

    The Pages/Visit signals the level of visitor interest and is particularly useful in later report modules to make judgments about the value of traffic sources etc.

    Analytics for business people

    This is one of a series of articles to help business people extract value from their Analytics reports.

    Got questions about interpreting your Analytics reports?

    Leave me a comment

    Cheers
    Pete

     

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    Listen to what your website is trying to tell you!

    Posted in Analytics Online Sales Organic search Tales from the trenches Website Analysis
    May 8th, 2009 by Pete

    I encountered a great example today of really appreciating what your website is trying to tell you.

    Actually it is really what visitor activity tells you, and the only way to ‘hear’ this is through interpreting website statistics.

    In this case the client had a temporary parking web page while they underwent the arduous task of implementing a new website.

    Recently installed, Analytics (my fav web metrics tool) revealed that the site was attracting visitors from searches nicely aligned with this client’s business and in their target geography. Great news!

    The bad news was Analytics revealed these visitors were immediately abandoning the site, apparently unimpressed with the parking page.

    Until I revealed this today the business had no idea how many sales opportunities it had lost, and as you would expect, the website refurbishment is now a top priority.

    How may sales leads are you loosing because you can’t hear what your website telling you ?

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    Paid search tips and traps

    Posted in AdWords Analytics Keywords Online Sales Organic search Website Analysis
    October 28th, 2008 by Pete

    So you’ve been telemarketed by yet another paid search provider and it sounds like an excellent marketing investment (and it is!).

    But how do you decide which paid search services your business needs, and importantly how do you decide which service provider to use ?  Could you DIY paid search ? Not sure? Read on. (more…)

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    Is W3C non-compliance costing you online sales?

    Posted in Organic search Website Analysis
    June 16th, 2008 by Pete

    It is easy to take for granted the amazingly sophisticated technologies that brings us the internet. The internet’s success stems from “ancientâ€? technical standards including those by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that you could easily think are just not relevant in a modern commercial internet.

    But with the growing realisation that online success starts with a quality sales-focussed website, these standards are not only relevant, but can provide a competitive edge for your website.

    (more…)

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    The Holographic website – A search disaster

    Posted in Organic search Tales from the trenches Website Analysis
    June 5th, 2008 by Pete

    Recently I stumbled over a holographic website.

    It looked like it was there, but it was really just a ghost, or at least that’s what Google thinks.

    As I usually do, I quickly review sites for attendees from my “Tune your website for Salesâ€? presentations, and on this occasion the business had found they just didn’t seem to rank in any searches.

    At the time we discussed the popularity of their relatively common business name, and I assumed that it was a typical case of organic competition. What a surprise I got !

    (more…)

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    Analytic’s bench-marking feature sets new standards for website assessment

    Posted in Analytics Website Analysis
    March 15th, 2008 by Pete

    Google Analytics’ new website benchmarking facility has the potential to become one of the most important developments in website performance assessment in years.

    This new capability allows performance comparison of your site against averaged data from participating websites in the same industry.

    To participate, businesses do have to be prepared to share their website’s performance data anonymously in the Google benchmarking database.  This means trusting Google with competitive information about your site, but benefits are significant.

    If you are not actively monitoring your website you are flying blind on the internet, and frankly probably loosing business you don’t even realise exists. 

    Google’s Analytics is free and a world class product to boot, and now has the unique ability to benchmark your website’s performance against your online competition as a tuning guide.

    For more information see the Google Analytics Benchmarking FAQs 

    In Australia, Google dominates internet searches, with typically 90% and up to 98% of all searches in sites monitored by Succinct Ideas are being conducted on google.com.au

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    Numbers that matter

    Posted in Analytics Organic search Website Analysis
    December 21st, 2007 by Pete

    The festive season is a challenging time to talk statistics, but this metric is special; it helps you understand how €sales effective€™ your website is and might even save you money!

    Pages per View
    This simple metric indicates how interested visitors are while in your website. The greater the level of interest, the more pages visitors will view.

    Most importantly Pages per View is NOT an indicator of how good your site is, but how well matched your visitors are to your site. Good matches represent prospective clients and sales; poor matches do not.

    In my experience an average pages per view of around 2.5 is a critical threshold; below which there is an increasing mismatch between visitor and content, with 1 being an absolute mismatch.  An average pages per view above 2.5 indicates an increasingly strong match.

    Page per View can be used in conjunction with other web site metrics to bring greater meaning to otherwise dry statistics; for example valuing referrals. (more…)

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    Get closer to Google with WebMasters Tools

    Posted in Principles Tools Website Analysis
    November 27th, 2007 by Pete

    Instead of trawling though your website statistics –a tedious and highly interpretable chore at best – assuming you even have access to your website statistics – check out these information systems provided by the major search engines:

    • Google’s Webmasters Tools  where there are some excellent free tools to interpret your site’s performance from a Google persective and they are regularly adding new capabilities including:
      • Diagnostics showing any issues GoogleBot encountered in your site
      • Statistics including ‘top search queries’ and where your site ranks for these
      • Links inbound and outbound as detected by Google – critical for PageRank
      • Sitemap registration and status information
      • Tools that allow you tune your site’s relationship with Google
    • Yahoo Site Explorer is similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools but with less capability
    • Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s beta webmaster centre with even less capability

    Each of these facilities require you to register yourself , then add a file or metatag to your site as an authentication test. 

    A very important function in each facility is the ability to register your website’s Sitemap.

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