The beauty of website analytics

Websites are wonderful things.  They are cheap to run and always open - building your business while you sleep.  They are also full of invaluable customer information. 

It’s extremely hard for traditional shop owners to understand exactly what their customers look at, how they move around the shop, what brought them through the door and so on.  But online, all that information is easily available, through your website analytics (performance data, gathered every time someone visits your site). 

Many small websites use Google analytics, a free and fairly comprehensive analytics package from Google. 

What do my analytics measure?

Different analytics packages report on different things, but the following are usually included:

• Number of visits by day, week, month (for every page you track)
• Amount of time they spent on the site
• Whether visitors are new or returning visitors
• Number of pages they viewed
• Which browser they used
• Where they came from (direct, referrer sites, search engines - and which ones)
• How they navigated the site - which pages they visited, in which order
• Geographical information to show where your users and customers are based
• Visitor loyalty - number of people visiting the site a certain number of times
   

Most analytics packages will display the information in graphs as well as lists and allow you to drill down to the detail or look at summary information.

How does that help me?

At a basic level, your website analytics can help you:

• Understand how many visitors your site is attracting
• Understand which pages your users visit most
• See whether a marketing campaign is driving more traffic to your site
• Understand which search engines and sites drive most traffic to your site
• See whether your site is down or links are broken (if traffic suddenly nose dives)
• See whether there are any pages where the drop out rates are particularly high (ie. Where you lose customers)
• Understand your "conversion" rate - how many lookers to bookers you get.  Even if you don’t sell anything on your site, you can see what proportion of lookers are requesting information / calling you / accessing forms etc.
• Understand the seasonality of your business.  Are certain months / days of the week particularly busy.  In turn, this can help you plan your on and offline marketing campaigns.
• Understand geographical "hot spots" where you might want to advertise.

Many of the analytics packages (eg. Google analytics) boast additional, more sophisticated features, which you might like to explore - measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your online advertising campaigns, customer segmentation analysis etc.

What do I do next?

Check with your web designer which analytics programme you have.  Start analyzing the data.  Review it regularly to see how things change as you make changes on the site, or to your website marketing.  If you don’t already have an analytics package, we suggest you sign up to Google Analytics free from http://www.google.com/analytics.