Monday, 3 August 2009
5 Tips For More Effective Website Traffic Analysis
Consistent and vigilant analysis of your website’s traffic statistics is a key ingredient of a successful online strategy. Bu even more important is putting all this information to create an informative and useful ‘bigger picture’. Here are some tips to help you keep this bigger picture in mind.
1. What’s your goal?
What’s the goal of your website, is it really just to get a much traffic as possible? Possibly, but if it’s not, think about the real goal of your website. There’s not point driving huge amounts of traffic to your website if this traffic doesn’t help you achieve your goals. Identify your goal then make sure your website is designed to meet this objective.
2. Focus on relative not absolute numbers
What’s a good conversion rate? How many visitors should we be getting on our website? The answer is ‘I can’t tell you’. It all depends, if you have a website about the various types of water crystals snow if formed of you’ll probably get less traffic than a celebrity gossip site. To keep the bigger picture of online success in mind. Think in relative terms. How much more traffic than last month/year are we getting, how has our conversion rate changed compared to last month? This will keep you focused on constant improvement rather than trying to figure out how you compare to other websites.
3. Don’t Stretch Yourself Too Thin
With the abundance of measurements and stats available to anyone managing a website these days, it’s easy to overload yourself trying to focus on every single stat your website analytics package offers up. Instead of take this certain path to analysis paralysis, focus on a few key statistics. For example:
- Visitors
- Bounce Rate
- Top Pages
It’s better to closely monitor and proactively work to improve on a smaller selection of stats than trying in vain to keep track of absolutely everything. Especially if you don’t have a dedicated analytics person or team.
4. Schedule It In
Rather than looking at your stats on an ad-hoc basis. Schedule in a set time each day or each week (e.g. Monday morning, Friday Afternoon) to go through an analyse your stats. A less frequent but focused examination of your stats is worth more than simply glancing through them on a daily basis.
5. Check for data black holes
If you can’t get stats for certain parts of your website, you’ll only being seeing part of the bigger picture. Make sure you have stats running accurately on all your key website and promotional pages. You’d be surprised at how many times these data ‘black holes’ crop up!
Ok so there you have it, 5 tips that I hope will make managing your website stats a little bit more straightforward. Good luck!
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