Analytics shows you who visits your website, where from, for how long, and what they do next. A good analytics program can provide you with a wealth of such information to help you grow your business and make more money from your web traffic.
How? Here are just a few ways:
- By helping you to keep people on your website longer – By showing you where people linger the longest, a web analytics program can help you to plan further similar content. Adding content people want means they’re more likely to do what you want them to – fill in your newsletter signup form, buy your product, give you a call…
- By giving you the tools to attract clients or customers in other geographical areas – Analytics shows you where people who view your website are. This can get you to thinking how to appeal to people in areas where you don’t do as well as you may like, or help you to further appeal to areas you seem to be doing better in than you thought you were.
- By showing you what other sites are driving traffic to your site – Inbound links mean more traffic and better visibility in the search engines. If certain sites are linking to your site lots, you can strengthen your relationship with them, or ask other similar sites if they’d like to link to your website too. If sites you feel should be linking to you aren’t, you can go about rectifying this.
- By showing you what search terms are driving traffic to your site – Knowing this will let you strengthen those that are doing well and work harder on those that you feel should be but aren’t, by adding new content appealing to the specific terms (for instance).
- By letting you build on your most popular pages – If certain blog posts or how-to guides, products or services are attracting lots of traffic, analytics can help you work out why this is. You can then grow this content if it helps your business, or add similar content to grow your site overall, or if it is actually NOT helping your business to have everyone looking at these pages, you can alter the content accordingly. Knowledge is power!
- By showing you where people exit your site – You probably don’t want anyone to leave your website until they’ve given you their credit card details/signed up for your newsletter/picked up the phone to call you* (*delete where applicable). Analytics shows you where people leave, so you can work to improve things. Maybe you don’t have enough links to other interesting content on those pages? Are you successfully persuading people into your buying process?
- By letting you set up goals - To improve it, you gotta measure it! Analytics lets you set up goals – number of products purchased, number of people who’ve downloaded a brochure, number of people who’ve signed up for your newsletter – whatever. By measuring these, you can instigate simple improvements and monitor their effectiveness, simply and quickly.
- By telling you the truth about what type of setup your customers have – Got a big site with bells and whistles? What if it turns out that 40% of your clients are using a five-year-old version of Internet Explorer and have small monitors that can’t even show a whole page of your swanky new site on one screen? Wouldn’t you be better off having a site that these clients can use properly? What if 20% are using iPhones to view your site? You just don’t know the answers to any of these questions until you find out – and analytics can help you do this.
As you can see, analytics is pretty much essential for anyone who wants their website to improve, keep up with the competition, and make more money online. Isn’t that all of us? So our advice is: If you don’t have analytics on your site, get it installed today.