Are you measuring your website traffic?

For any business to be successful in its inbound marketing program, website activity must be measured and translated into meaningful data for management.  This is called Website Traffic Analysis.  You should be able to analyze and show a  full customer picture across your website.

When DDKinfotech starts working with a Client, one of the most common question asked is which web analytics tool to use.  There are number of options available, depending on the needs and what sort of information you are trying to gather from  the data set that you collect from your website.  However, for most small businesses, Google Analytics is a great package, because of its ease of installation and it provides a wealth of information for no cost.

To help Clients understand the key data points to measure, DDKinfotech is providing below a list of top metrics to monitor on an ongoing basis.

1. Audience overview

When you login into Google Analytics dashboard, one of the first thing you will see is the Audience overview.  This section provides critical information on the number of Visits, Unique Visitors, Page Views, Pages Visited, average visit duration and bounce rate.   These metrics provide a good summary of how your website is performing overall. This is true because not only can you determine how many people are coming to your site, but also how much content they're looking at and how long they're staying. Both of these speak directly to visitor engagement.

If you're just starting out, the best thing to do is compare these numbers month over month to look for trends or changes in visitor behavior. If your inbound marketing program is effective, you'll see an increase in several of these categories.

2. Sources

This is another important metric. Sources refers to where, exactly, your site visitors are coming from.  This is one of the key metric, as it will help you determine just what platforms are best for reaching majority of your audience.   As an example, if you see that most of your site visitors are finding you on facebook, but nothing from linkedin, you know where you should be concentrating your social media campaigns.

3.  Content
Content is king.  Content Strategy is key for attracting new visitors and keeping existing ones.  Google analytics tool can help you determine how your content is doing, and if there are any gaps.  The average visit time will help you determine whether or not site visitors are reading your site content, this will be a good indication whether your site content is useful or not.

4. Landing and exit pages
This metric is located under the site content in the content menu.  Landing and exit pages are important metric because it lets you know where visitors are entering your site and where they're exiting. For businesses not leveraging a complex pay per click (PPC) or SEO strategy, the most popular landing page will be your home page. However, when and where site visitors are leaving your site can be very telling about your website and the associated content.
Beyond content exploration, knowing from which page visitors are exiting  will determine the overall bounce rate. If a high number of visitors exit the site from the same page it may indicate dissatisfaction with content or the lack of a clear call to action. It may also mean visitors were looking for a specific piece of content but became frustrated and left when they couldn't find it. If you notice a high concentration of visitors exiting the site from the same page, it should be a clue that you need to review that content.

Google analytics can provide powerful insight into any internet marketing efforts and optimization.