How Do You Know If Your Website or Marketing is Working?
ANALYTICS.
But, how do you get the most out of your analytics and apply that to your web strategy?
Do you know what drives your web traffic? How many visitors on average drop by in a month? Do you know what pages interest those visitors the most? Most importantly, do you know how many of those visitors actually purchased anything?
If you can’t answer these questions, it may be time to learn more about analytics.
Don’t worry – you don’t need to be a math wiz or online marketing genius to use analytics. A lot of great, free programs exist that do the work for you (we link some below for your convenience). However, all of that information becomes useless if you don’t do anything with it. We understand that getting started may be intimidating, so we broke down six fundamental things to remember to help you going:
1. Don’t Get Hung Up on Your Number of Visitors or Fans
Don’t concentrate on volume instead of quality. Bigger is not better in this case. A huge fan base alone won’t generate revenue. It doesn’t matter how many people stop by if they don’t share your values and plan to buy something at any time in the future. Focus instead on attracting your ideal clients by seeking out and engaging with your target market. By shifting your efforts to quality leads over superficial contacts, you may see lower visits, but much higher sales conversion rates.
2. Don’t Get Lost in Terminology
Familiarize yourself with proper terms and general knowledge about analytics. You don’t need to go out and earn a statistics degree, just make sure you can “talk the talk” and understand what each measurement means. For example, which is more important to your website: hits or pageviews? Learn the basics and you may just find out that the rest might come to you more easily than you think.
TIP: Hits just measure a request made to a server, of which dozens if not hundreds may exist for a single page load. Pageviews measure how many unique pages a visitor viewed on your website, arguably the more valuable metric.
3. Know the Difference Between a Unique Visitor and a Return Visitor
Your number of visits doesn’t matter if it’s just your mom stopping by your page a hundred times a week. Nor does it count when your same clients keep dropping in. You need to expand your reach and attract new leads and readers to your page. Find out if your page continually receives new readers or if it’s just the same old crowd. If you need fresh blood, time to change up your marketing strategy and attract some more quality fans.
4. Learn the Keywords People Use to Find Your Page
Analytics programs typically provide you with a list of the most popular search words or phrases people used to find your website. Instead of saying, “Oh, that’s interesting” use those to your advantage. Utilize those phrases during your search engine optimization (SEO) or perhaps purchase those keywords for even higher search prominence. No matter what, don’t dismiss this insight. Knowing how your visitors find you is incredibly information to know when trying to figure out how to lure them back.
5. Know What Links Feed Your Webpage
Find out where your visitors come from. We’re talking about the other websites or pages that are referring visitors to your site, not country; that’s demographics. Where did they see a link that they clicked on that lead them to you?
You want to know this, so you don’t spend all of your time marketing or engaging on the wrong platforms. For example, don’t spend all day tweeting if your all of your visitors come to your page through Facebook. You might want to adjust your Twitter strategy, but focus on your strengths and let your ideal market dictate to you where they hang out. Once you find them, engage and get them back to your page!
6. Find Out Who’s Bailing On You and Why
Analytics programs typically measure your bounce rate, or percentage of visitors who came, saw, and instead of conquering left without clicking on anything else. Or perhaps you can trace through the respective paths of your visitors and see where they drop off. Do they get to your sales landing page? Do they click on your newsletter sign-up page? Your home page should have clear paths to action that lead visitors quickly and easily to the information they seek. You’ll always get people who don’t find what they initially seek and drop off right away, but for those who stick around make sure your pages flow in a way to prevent drop-offs and lead your visitors to the destinations that you want them to go.
Again, don’t fear analytics. If they intimidate you, then take it slowly and break down the whole by trying to understand each measurement one-by-one. One you start to grasp a few, learning the rest should become easier for you. Next thing you know you may be an expert with your own blog living a life unbound!
As promised, here’s some of those platforms that offer analytics:
Do you have a favorite analytics platform other than the ones shown above? Share it with us in the comments!