Calm Mediacentre

Gone are the days of spending thousands of pounds a year allowing you to track and monitor your customer journey on your website. Now you are able to use a free web analytics solution, Google Analytics. This allows website owners and also bloggers who previously couldn’t justify the cost to take a good hard look at how hard their site is working for them. Just like another saying my Father taught me, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

Its all very well having all this data on your customer journey, but how do you use it to your benefit without getting bogged down. I have put together some top tips on how to use your analytics to improve your website in laymen’s terms (I am Scottish its the only way I know how)!

Page views

No matter what kind of site you have, you will most likely benefit from visitors viewing a higher number of pages on your site. With every statistic you aim to improve, get an average number and investigate further before attempting to increase. Think about what you can do to your site to increase the number of page views.  Do your research and check out your competitors (nick their idea’s) and be willing to change things. Are you cross-promoting similar products people might be interested in?  Are you providing useful content to go along with products, as we all know content is king!

Referring Links

Take a close look at your inbound links, what sites are referring traffic to you through normal links. Why are they doing so? Is it possible to improve those relationships to get even more traffic from them? Are there more sites like these that could be approached and perhaps linked with via a reciprocal relationship?  Are there any types of sites you think you should be getting links from but aren’t? Why not? If not, maybe you should focus on your content and create some good quality content to go with your products. If so, are there more links you could get from external sites who like / need your content. You have to have something they want i.e (content, tools) that would add value to their site and their customers.

Geographic Reach

Examine your geographic location statistics and see what areas of the UK or world you receive the majority of your traffic from and the areas you are weak in. What can you do to improve traffic in places you’re weak and what can you do to strengthen your traffic in areas where you’re strong? Are you marketing yourself to your weak regions?  Should you invest in Pay Per Click or optimise your site for searches in your weak areas? Contact me if you want to know more about PPC marketing.

Organic Search Terms

Just like referring links, what can you learn from organic search terms? Can you get more traffic and better rankings for the terms that are doing well? Are there terms you’re not ranking well for? Can you create more  content for those? Should you consider reviewing your current strategy and contacting a digital agency.  It is likely you will need to review your SEO strategy and adjusting your link building strategy accordingly.

Constantly update your content

Examine your most commonly visited content and analyze why. Is it because it has the most links to it? Because the way the website is structured? Or is it because it’s the most useful or relevant content to visitors? Once you know why, expand that content and add further depth.  Your most popular content may be a certain product or category. Is it possible to add more products of that type or category? Are your most desirable products being found and is it possible to create feature rich content that Google will love. Is the top content really the products you want to have the most traffic?

Monitor Your Bounce Rate

Generally your top [hot] content generates traffic from natural search listings and becomes an entry point to your site. This because either organic search terms or links send visitors to your top content first. Google analytics and most analytics tools have a Bounce or Exit rate. This is vitally important as the percentage indicates the visitors that have exited on the same page they arrived on, not finding what they were looking for.  A low percentage indicates they clicked on other parts of your site before leaving, and a large percentage is very bad as it means they have just viewed the page and left.  Obviously the lower percentage the better as ideally you want them to find the information they were looking for and move on to look at other pages and ultimately convert the sale. (happy days).  Investigate the path you want your visitor to take from the landing page to reach the information you would like to supply them with.  Is your sales process working correctly?  Are you giving the visitor all the information they require in order to make an informed decision and complete the cycle and purchase?

Monitor Website Parameters

Google Analytics and most analytics packages allow you to see things like what operating system your customer is using, what resolution their screen is set at, if they have Flash installed, what browsers they are using and host of other data which can be used.  There’s nothing worse than finding out 50 percent of your audience are Apple users and you’ve never seen how awful and un-rendered your site looks on an Apple Mac.  Check this regularly to make sure your site is designed to look and operate well as much of your audience as possible. You should rigorously perform cross-browser testing to make sure your not providing a bad user experience – once a customer has had a bad experience you’ve lost them for good.

Goals

Always establish your goals in advance as you can always change them once you’re up and running.  Google Analytics and most other analytics apps allow you to setup conversion goals of different types.  This isn’t always a sale; on a non ecommerce platform it could be a set goal of having someone request further information or subscribe for a news letter, view a certain amount of pages, or view a particular page or just pick up the phone and contact you. Once you have set up these goals, you can then track them and monitor how well you are performing. There are loads of analytics and analysis that can go into this which I will be discussing at a later date.  But basically track your conversion rate (visitors divided by sales) new avenues for relevant traffic, and improve your statistics from your average stats.

Page Rank And Alexa Traffic Rank

These are important gauges of how well your website is performing and often over-looked.  Google Page Rank is on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest only available to the likes of the BBC. This is scored by Google indicating the web pages relevance and also value. Alexa Traffic Rank is based on 3 months combined traffic computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. A tool I found useful for checking other sites particular competitors is yowzaa and also a cool tool bar which will allow you to monitor every website you visit is toolbar.

Round Up

Start spending a bit of time looking at your analytics, because like me once you start it is like being on eBay, it’s addictive…..  Allowing you to work out exactly how many visitors you need to reach your revenue goals and changing content constantly watching the money roll in.

Its great having this data as it will allow you to improve your website and gain a better understanding of your customer journey which is invaluable. I hope this helps and should you need any clarification please don’t hesitate to contact me.