Manage small businesses with websites or one-man website owners engage in website promotion and marketing to promote their products. When questioned about web analytics, it comes as a surprise that many of those companies and website owners do not have any idea what it is all about. This may not be applicable to mature online marketers, but happens frequently with blogs and websites that are new.

If you are a novice when it comes to online businesses, the idea of web analytics, finding useful information, and the thought of digging in can be intimidating. Although measuring what you have to market is a common marketing sense, making sense out of analytics data is not a top priority when it comes to the responsibilities of new website owners or small businesses.

It may be because the amount of information found when an analytics package is delivered is quite difficult to deliberate on and be turned into business decisions. Keeping it simple or starting with the basics is what those who are beginners in web analytics should do.

Every analytics package differ in learning curve, price, and features. My suggestion is to start with Google Analytics because it is free, not that complicated to be learned, has a rather intuitive interface (or at least they try to lol) and is feature-rich. Take a look at the following below.

1. Unique Visitors (also referred to as unique hits/pageviews) – An important metric because this will count everyone as one for a period of time. If you have had 250 people visiting your site even just once, it means you have got 250 unique visitors. Now when your unique visitor number count it low, it simply means that your site may have issues with search engines or you might require more content for your site.

2. Total Visitors (also referred to as total hits/pageviews) – This is the total number of times your website or any internal page of your website has been accessed. If the same person accesses your website 50 times within a specific time frame, it counts as 1 unique visit and 50 total visits.

3. Traffic Sources – For example, it shows you are getting traffic from Twitter, Google, Yahoo, or other sites. This referring information gives you an idea where your traffic comes from and also helps you make a decision on how or where to promote your content and products in the future.

4. Referring Keywords – Such are phrases that people use or the words they type into search engines, which lead them to your site. Ideally, these are keyword phrases in relation to your business. If not, it could indicate either you are not optimized or might be optimized for incorrect phrases.

5. Top Content – Regardless of the size of your site, the knowledge of what pages get most traffic will help when you build new pages. So using similar format or writing content about that topic will help in driving more traffic. Pages that contain CTA or call to action buttons must be included if you would like your visitors downloading white paper or doing something specific.

6. Location – For business who want strong local presence, analytics can give you location area like a city, state, or country where your visitors come from. It would be good to know if your visitors are actually local.

7. Campaign Tracking – Simply to track your visitors from sources marketed by you to a specific goal page or conversion.

Once you have grasped the idea of what Google Analytics is all about, you can now check out other actionable data such as trends, features, and conversions like the most frequently used search terms found in internal search engines.  Features like top entrance/exit pages, goals, time on site, and bounce rates are good metrics as well that you can use to understand your visitors’ interaction with the content that you have provided. You can visit the Google Analytics Help page to figure out all that you ought to know so you can maximize the use of GA.

There is plenty of information needed to be analyzed as well as decisions needed to be made, thus, web analytics may be overwhelming. Take it slowly but surely instead of jumping in and consuming it all.

admin Web Marketing, Web Traffic