Website analytics are an extremely helpful tool for businesses, if they know what they’re looking at. While combing through web stats isn’t exactly everyone’s idea of a good time, knowing what you’re looking for and what the stats mean could help you engage your audience, know where to put more effort, and even let you know what’s not working on your site.
At the end of each month, we review all our clients’ websites and provide an analytics report. This includes bounce rate, user analytics, engagement on top sites, click through rates of downloadable content, and an explanation of what all these things mean.
Here are three of the things we look at and what they mean to help you be more knowledgeable when looking at your own analytics.
Bounce rate: the percentage of people that land on a page and then leave. This could mean that people found your site by accident or were directed there but did not mean to click on it and then once they arrive, they leave right away, without going to other pages. Or, it could mean you posted a direct link to a page and the person found what they were looking for, without roaming through the site. If your bounce rate is higher than 60% and you haven’t been promoting links directly to certain pages, you’ll want to review your SEO.
Unique pageviews: this stat aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session so they are only counted as one. So, if someone visits your site 30 times in a month, they show it only as 1. This way the stats don’t get skewed by staff or admin who use the site regularly. We want this number to be high as we want a many different people visiting your site as possible.
Top pages viewed: These are the pages that were viewed the most over the course of the month. This stat is helpful as it shows where people are spending their time. If you are putting a lot of effort into writing blogs each month but no one goes there – either start promoting the blogs more or cut out time spent on them and put it into the other pages. If people are going to the contact page a lot but you are not being contacted, check the page out and see if there is something that may be deterring people from clicking ‘submit.’ By understanding your audience’s behaviour on your website, you are able to tailor the experience more so that each person can find what they need.
We go through many more topics in our monthly analytics reports to our clients, but hopefully this gave you some insight into what to look for and why these stats can help your website grow! If you are looking to have professional analytics reports created for you, so you don’t have to do the guesswork, give us a call! We’d be happy to chat.
