5 Areas Of Website Analytics You Need To Focus On is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Use web analytics to understand your site visitors.

Measuring results is important in everything we do in business and is one of the keys to constant improvement; so once you have your site up and running, what website analytics tools do you use to monitor its performance?

There are five key areas we have identified that you can focus your attention on – not only to point out weaknesses of your site, but to see what’s working well.

1. Number Of Visitors

The number of visitors you get is one determining factor of how successful your online business will ultimately be, as site traffic means leads – it’s the equivalent of people passing your high street shop.

Seeing an incremental increase with some welcome spikes in numbers now and again should mean that you are doing the right things, though obviously it’s difficult to be specific with numbers; if you are operating in a small niche you may be after smaller numbers of highly qualified traffic rather than mass numbers.

2. Who Are The Referrers?

Installing Google Analytics allows you to see where your visitors are coming from – who the referral sites are.

This is important as it can help you to identify where your optimization efforts are working best. For example you may see that most of your traffic comes from YouTube or Google organic searches; rather than focus on getting traffic from other sources, you may like to focus future marketing efforts on developing these traffic sources, encouraging even more traffic to click through from those referrers.

Often website owners spend too much time worrying about “plugging holes” and finding out where they are weak rather than using the areas where they are particularly strong to their full advantage.

3. Bounce Rate

This site analytics tool is a measure of the visitors who come to your site and then move quickly on, either finding it’s not what they’re after or clicking through by mistake. Essentially they may land on your page and then hit the “Back” button within seconds.

As a general guideline, if you are finding a bounce rate of over 40% then perhaps you need to be thinking about engaging your visitors more; you are not grabbing their attention and getting them to “stick” to your page.

4. Time On Page

This is also a good measure of how engaging your page is to your visitors. If the time is less than a minute then it’s not usually enough time to absorb your message; nowadays using video is a great way to grab attention and engage your visitor sufficiently so that you can drive the average time spent on your page upwards. Make sure your copy is sharp and compelling too – average online attention spans are short and getting shorter!

5. Conversions

Check conversion rates – both for opt-ins to your free reports/newsletters etc and for actual sales.

Think of ways you can increase conversion rates by improving copy/videos to make your message more compelling; a guideline target for opt-ins would be somewhere between 15-25% and for conversion to sales might be around 2%, but it really depends on your business and where your traffic is coming from/how prequalified it is.

As you can see from the above, website analytics can be used to closely monitor site performance and can help you fine-tune your site and marketing approaches for better results.

The Competition Crusher workshop is full of advice and tips like this for creating successful start-up online businesses. Just click here to watch it for free.

Does Google Use Google Analytics Against You? is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Is Google spying on you?

To rephrase the question, does Google spy on you with their Google Analytics? Do they take this information and then potentially use it against you?

I think this idea comes from the conspiracy theorists who want you to believe Google is evil. Sure it’s true that Google currently dominates many utilities on the web: email, analytics and all of the others in Google Apps.

That said, Matt Cutts, an engineer from Google’s web spam team, has said on record that his team doesn’t get access to Google Analytics, and the Google Analytics team doesn’t have access to their information. So they don’t use Google Analytics against anyone. Who knows if he’s being truthful or not?

When all is said and done, I just don’t worry about it. We use Google Analytics on all of our primary money sites – their tools are just so valuable and better than most paid ones. We just make sure we don’t use sneaky redirects, cloaking or any aggressive blackhat stuff on those sites

If you’re going to use Google’s tools, make your website as good as you can, following all the guidelines that Google provides.

And here’s the philosophy we live by, don’t worry what others are doing. Focus on what you’re doing and that includes not worrying about Google.

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Stage 4: Website Analytics is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Site Reporting & Ongoing SEO

Unlike many traditional marketing methods, with SEO you are able to get a very clear, measurable result for your efforts through website analytics. You are able to see where you appear on Google, how many new visitors this brought to your website and how many of these visitors went on to make a purchase. And that’s just the beginning…

Once you engage in website analysis and start to see the benefits of a successful SEO campaign (through website analytics), it can become very addictive. You’ll look to identify new keywords, bringing you even more visitors, and then improve the rate at which your website converts these visitors into sales. That’s why SEO needs to be a part of your long-term sales and marketing strategy.

The fact is, you can’t improve what you don’t track… and that’s why we suggest you track everything! If you don’t currently have any tracking on your website, check out a free service called Google Analytics – it’ll provide you with more information than you’ll know what to do with.

The key metrics we like to follow, include:

Unique Visitors
It’s important to keep an eye on the number of unique visitors to your website. Be wary of any webmaster that talks in terms of “hits”. Hits really aren’t a very good representation as to the number of visitors to your site – it can make things appear busier than they really are. Instead, you want to see your unique visitors increasing month on month.

*By following the right steps you can very easily see increases of 300%+ but it all depends on how your site is currently performing.

Actual Pages Visited
Seeing where your visitors go when on your website can identify some easy opportunities to increase profits. Knowing what pages are most visited then gives you the opportunity to improve the rate at which those pages convert. This is often overlooked by those new to SEO, yet it can give you one of the biggest returns. And here’s why…

*Increasing a page’s conversion rate from 1%-2% will yield the same profit results as doubling your traffic. That is to say, you’re converting twice as many visitors from the same number of visitors.

Length of Stay
Have you ever visited a website only to leave almost immediately? Most likely you didn’t find what you were looking for and so you didn’t make a purchase. By analysing how long your visitors stay on your website (along with a few other tests) you can identify what made them leave. Obviously you want to give them what they are looking for and the longer they stay, the greater the chance they’ll purchase your product or service.

What Customers Are Buying
Many people tend to focus on their weaknesses, thinking they need to become stronger in that area. The reverse is actually true. It’s important to analyse where you’re already successful and do more of that. By analysing what’s already selling, you’ll be able to build your website (and profits) faster than you ever thought imaginable.

Want to find out more about website analytics, watch this: