Having a website is great. You can look at it, play with it, show it off to people, but do you actually know how well your site is performing, which of its pages are the most popular, how long people stay on your site and even where they found your site from?
For some, the answer will be yes, for many, the answer will be no.
Understanding your traffic is the only way you can improve your site to get more traffic. Understanding what works and what doesn’t means you can focus on the good side and less on the not so good. Understanding where people find your site will help you to focus more on increasing exposure in these areas.
Its all about understanding!
All of our sites come equipped with Google Analytics, a free but amazing website tracking system that will give you more information than you could possibly shake a stick at. We also help our customers to understand the reports we produce and you also have access to your statistics at any time, we have nothing to hide and nor would we want to.
If you have a website and would like us to install this for you, please phone 01594 835857 or email us at info@clearwebservices.com for more information. We can offer advice and installation of the system, which will really help you to not only understand your website, but more importantly, your clients and customers.
For all of our clients on a monthly package, we add the Google Analytics for free and send regular reports as part of our clients hours, per package. If you would like our help to set up Google Analytics and install it on your website, we can help with this for a nominal one off charge of £50, which will include the full installation and a quick training session to make sure you know how to use the system.
What Is Website Analytics?
Although there are hundreds of systems and pieces of software on the market, some costing hundreds of pounds, we use the free Google Analytics, which in our opinion is by far the best analytics system on the web.
Basically, website analytics is a tool for recording statistics. How many people come to your website, how many pages they visit etc. But we can now also record what pages they look, where they click, where they come from and basically, how they use your website. Over the past 4 years, the system has improved so much that it is now so important we make sure we install it on all of our sites and our clients sites as well.
You can find a full list of the features on the Google Analytics site, by clicking here.
What Can I Find Out?
Within reason, pretty much anything !
There are always new features being added to the system, but at the present time Google Analytics can show you (we have not listed everything, there is a lot more to be found):
Visitors
Map Overlay – It can actually show you not only the country but the city the user clicked from, in some cases.
New vs. Returning – How many new people come to your website compared to existing or regular users.
Languages - Which language their browser is set to, which you can assume is their native language.
Visits - How many visits or users have visited your website.
Absolute Unique Visitors – How many visits or users have visited your website that are totally unique, ie one visitor is unique.
Page Views – How many pages each visitor looked at.
Average Page Views – The average amount of pages views.
Time on Site - How long the visitor spent on the website.
Bounce Rate - A Bounce Rate is where the visitor comes to the site, takes one look and goes. Think of it like a bouncing ball, it bounces, that’s it, doesn’t stay on the floor just bounces back to your hand.
Visitor Loyalty – This section gives you a lot of information about your visitors, including how loyal they are (how often they return), how recent they have visited you, how long they stayed for and how many pages they visited.
Browsers - What browser and version each visitor used on your site, a great way of making sure your site works for all of the main browsers your visitors are using.
Operating Systems – Which operating system they were using.
Screen Colours - What settings each visitor has the screen colours set to.
Screen Resolutions – What settings each visitor has the screen resolution set to, again, this is ideal for making sure you site meets everyone’s needs.
Traffic Sources
Direct Traffic – How many people typed in your domain name, this is a direct visi
t.
Referring Sites – All of the sites that have sent you traffic, ideal for tracking link backs and performing advertisements.
Search Engines – Which search engins have sent you traffic and also the keywords people found your site for.
All Traffic Sources – A list of all sources to show where your traffic comes from.
AdWords – There are a lot of extras that can help you track your CPC and PPC campaigns via your analytics system.
Content
Top Content – Shows which content or pages are performing well.
Content by Title - Shows which content or pages are performing well, by title of page.
Top Landing Pages – A Landing page is where the visitor “lands” on your site. After a year in Google you should have many pages indexed, this lets you see which pages the visitor has landed on from the source they have come from.
Top Exit Pages – An exit page is simply where the visitor left. If they leave on the same page they arrive, this is a “bounce”, but this tool lets you see the pages people left your site from.
Site Overlay – A great little tool. Click the button and it puts a mask on your website allowing you to see the links people have clicked on. This is continually improving in accuracy and worth keeping an eye on.
