Web Site Analytics

Web Site Analytics

The first step in generating a positive return on your web site is to set measurable business goals, and to monitor progress toward these goals. Careful management of your web site analytics will ensure that your web site sees commercial success.

What is Web site analytics?

Web site analytics is one of the most important first steps in understanding how visitors - your potential customers - use your web site. These metrics can tell you anything from how your visitors got to your site to how long they spent on each page, and can also help you identify any stumbling blocks your visitors encounter in trying to use your site. Decisions about your site's content should be based on these Web metrics, not guesswork.

Converting your visitors

Your Web site analytics conversion rate tells you how many of your visitors are being "converted" from mere visitors into clients, customers, leads, or subscribers.

There are several ways to increase traffic to your site, and thus convert more visitors into more customers through analytics. Investing money in a pay per click advertising campaign or search engine optimization will increase the odds of attracting visitors to your site who will complete a purchase or become clients. This "desired outcome" is the most basic and fruitful analytic return on your investment. A well-built pay per click advertising campaign, with optimized search terms, can bring visitors to your web site for mere pennies per click.

Once you've worked so hard to get visitors to your site, it's imperative that even the most basic user can easily navigate the site to find what they're looking for. A "drop-off point," or a "leak," is a place on your site where visitors inadvertently leave the site because of navigation complications and these 'drop offs' can be discovered through web site analytics.

Steps to Improving Your Conversion Rate:

1. Reduce the number of clicks to a visitor's desired action
2. Search out drop-off points and eliminate them through analytics
3. Identify bottlenecks and improve traffic flow through analytics
4. Examine the analytics of your visitors to identify conversion ratios
5. Study the visitors who complete specified actions and become clients through analytics
6. Compare the variances in conversions from different search engines and advertisements
7. Compare behavioral differences between first-time and repeat visitors through analytics
8. Identify your "target visitor" and work to attract similar user types through analytics

Examing Clickstreams

"Clickstreams," also known as "clickpaths" in analytics, represent the route that visitors choose when clicking or navigating through your site. A clickstream is a list of all the pages viewed by a visitor, presented in the order the pages were viewed. A clickstream, also defined as the succession of mouse clicks that each visitor makes, can serve as a very important analytical tool. The clickstream will show you when and where a person came into a site, all the pages that he or she viewed, how long they spent on each page, and when and from where they left.

When taken together as aggregated statistics in analytics, clickstream information will tell you, on average, the amount of time visitors spend on your site and how often they return. It will also identify your site's most frequently viewed pages.

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