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Health & Fitness

Are You Tracking Your Website Traffic?

I sat in a meeting last night discussing what my business can do to help small to mid-sized companies, the usual, Web design, SEO, Internet Marketing and classes. One of the things that I discuss with any prospect is traffic, how it gets there and how to track where it comes from. How will you know how well your website is performing and what your conversion rates are if you aren’t tracking? It is a crucial step that a lot of people don’t even look at. This part amazes me when I talk to people that have amazing looking sites, but feel that they are a waste of money.

If you have a website that you feel was a waste of money, then you probably aren’t tracking it or you have never had any SEO work done to your site. Well, there are the rare occasions that it is something else. But even the worst looking site should be able to pull some traffic. Speaking of that, I had a website that I had done years ago that wasn’t the prettiest site. But it performed better with conversions than sites that looked a lot better.

What Do You Need To Be Looking At?

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Well there are a ton of things you really need to look at, but for the purpose of this blog post we will highlight the main ones. Before we go any further if your website doesn’t have Google Analytics setup on it, then make a note right now to email me, or your designer to get it setup for you. Once you have it setup it will take a solid month to really start giving you data you can work with. Let us just say that you now have about 3 months of data to look at. Where do you start?

My main numbers I want to know is, how many visits did I get, how long were they on my site and what was my bounce rate.  I want to look at these numbers over a span of time, but usually the past 30 days is a good indicator of my current situation. Now with my visits I want to see how many were unique, which means these are people that have never been to my site before. Now if you are super familiar with all of this, I am speaking in broad generalities for the sake of keeping this simple and short. Ok, so once I know how many people I have coming to my site it makes me curious how many of those people purchased something from me or made my phone ring or emailed me.

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Tracking is super important in your business! You need to know where you customers are coming from so that if there is a good source of traffic you can spend time cultivating that resource and see what you can do to bolster traffic in some of your other areas. So make sure as you start looking at these numbers that you are asking new clients and customers how they found your phone number, email or business.

So lets say I had 500 people visit my site in the past month, on average they spent 1 minute and 30 seconds on my site. These are numbers I would be ok with in certain markets. Lets say I get 1000 visits per month and the average time on my site is less than 30 seconds. Well, my phone better be ringing 800 times or more in that month from all of those people. If it is not, then I probably have an issue. That means your site is not converting people to phone calls in a short amount of time.

Here is another one for you, let’s say you are getting 10,000 hits a month, your average time on site 2 minutes, but your bounce rate is 85%. That means that you have great traffic that captures a very particular market and you need to look at your website and where the traffic is coming from very closely. None of these numbers mean anything by themselves; it is only when you combine and compare with your other numbers do you really start to see a better picture. This is where if you liked math and algebra in high school and college, well now it will come in handy. This happens to be one of my favorite parts of my job. Looking at these numbers, seeing what they mean and finding out how that translates into money for your business. Who doesn’t like money?

Ok I hope that isn’t super convoluted but it gives you a base feel of some of the first things you need to be looking at for tracking. I also hope that it gives you a little bit more of an understanding that you need to look at each of the numbers and not just one portion of them. They all work hand in hand to paint a picture of your online business world.

What else do I really need to be looking for?

Several things, but I am going to talk about one more area because of how important it is. In Google Analytics, there is a tab that says “Acquisition”, under there is a section that says “all traffic”. This is a great place to find out who is showing you love and who isn’t. By that I mean, who is sending traffic to your website and who is not. I have one website that is for testing that Google refuses to send traffic to, but I get a ton of traffic from Yahoo and Bing. This is fine for this website, because it is setup to make it where Google doesn’t want to send traffic to it. That will be until I find the way to trick Google into sending traffic to it. But I won’t know when or if that will ever happen if I am not looking at these numbers.

I love looking at the traffic base after I push out content marketing either for myself or for my clients. Now I usually wait 2 weeks before I really look at the numbers, because I want to see the short term effect for this push. But what I want to see is how many people actually read what I put out there and then took an action. Usually by clicking on a link that was a part of the post. This is something you will want to look at as well, is where the traffic came from, then look at where they landed on your website. This is especially important if you have more than one link in your marketing material. You will want to know what caused them to take that action to ultimately end up on your website.

This just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the numbers you should be looking at for your website. I am going to be teaching an analytics class this year, so make sure you are on my email list to find out when that date is announced. I want to go through the numbers that all help tell you a story about your website. It is really hard to do in the space allotted for a blog post, which is why I will have to end this here.

If you do nothing else today except get Google Analytics setup on your website or look at your numbers from your analytics, then you will be doing better than you were yesterday. A cautionary word for you though… Do not become obsessed with the numbers, they are here to tell you a story about what is working and what is not. Remember that as you look at them, they tell you something, it is up to your web master or consultant to explain to you what they mean. If you don’t have someone that can explain these things to you, feel free to reach out to me.

Want to reach your goals for 2014? Look at your numbers and see if they are on track and if they are not, then make a change to help with those numbers. Analytics is an important part of any web design, internet marketing or SEO plan. One more quick caution for you, other programs are fine for tracking, but few give you the data that you need like Google. There are paid tools that will give you better and more info, but for most people GA is just fine.

I hope that all of you have a great 2014 and please feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have.

Please read the Original Blog post at: http://www.freskosmedia.com/tracking-website-traffic/

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