This 10 minute marketing tip will help you learn more about what visitors are doing on your website, where they are coming from and how they are getting there. It’s crucial to know this information if you intend on marketing your business online and even offline. If you’re not tracking this information then it’s going to be tough to figure out what’s working.
The tool most companies use is Google Analytics. If you don’t have an account you can sign up here, it’s free!
The 3 metrics that are crucial to look at for your business are:
– Traffic Overview
– Traffic Acquisition
– Traffic Behavior
Basically we want to see how much traffic you’re getting and how long visitors are on your site (overview), how they are getting to your site (acquisition), and what pages they are looking at (behavior).
I look at these metrics for all my clients and it literally only takes around 5 minutes per client. I also look at some advanced stats that I’ll talk about later on but let’s start with these 3.
A lot of people that do SEO worry about where they are ranking in the search engines, “I want to rank for X keyword” but they really should be looking at traffic. It’s much more important to understand than Googleing yourself.
Golden Nuggets For The 3 Metrics
I always like to include some golden nuggets. Here is what you want to look for when looking at your traffics overview, acquisition and behavior.
Traffic Overview
Compare your traffic to the previous year if possible. The reason you don’t want to do month to month is that your traffic will act different each season and time of the year.
Sessions: This is your overall traffic. It’s always good to know this number. You want to see a slow increase in this area.
Pageviews: If you have a lot of pageviews that’s great! It means that people are looking at more than one page on your site. If you’re a local business (plumber, dentist) this number could be low and that’s ok. If a user is only looking for your contact info then they might only go to one page on your site.
Avg. Session Duration: The longer the better but again your visitors might be there to get some quick info and then leave.
Bounce Rate: 100% means that the visitor went to your site and immediately left your site. 50% means they spent some time and went to more than one page. The lower the better but again it depends on your business. If they are there for some quick info then this might be higher than an ecommerce site where users are scrolling around different pages.
Traffic Acquisition
Here you want to look at where your traffic is coming from. Google organic means that people are searching specific terms for your business and then clicking on your site. Google PPC would be traffic that is coming from Google ads.
Nugget: If you’re spending a lot of time on Facebook and other social posts then you’ll be able to see if that effort is converting into people coming from Facebook to your site. If you don’t see any traffic then it might be a good idea to rethink your strategy.
Traffic Behavior
We want to look at the top pages on your site. Believe it or not one of the most popular page on websites is your about page.
Look what pages people are looking at and then go to that page and make sure it’s working correctly and important contact info is on that page.
Can they contact you for more information on this page easily?
Do you have a lot of good content on this page?
If your about page gets a lot of traffic and is really short, doesn’t have pictures and doesn’t tell a “story” about your business then it’s time to look it over again.
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Which metric are you confused about? Let me know in the comments below.
