There’s no doubt that the BEST use of any website statistics programs is tracking the goals that you set up for the website.

Wait, what?  Did I hear you say “What goals?” – Are you one of the millions of website owners who don’t have specific goals for each website page?  Then,  what are you marketing?  How do you know you’ve succeeded?  Just because the phone is ringing more doesn’t mean there are more sales.  Just because there’s more email in your inbox doesn’t mean it isn’t more spam!

Here’s the basic concept:

1) Go to each page of your website and make a conscious decision of what GOAL do you want to achieve with that page.  Do you want the visitor to move to another page?  Do you want the visitor to call you?  Do you want the visitor to email you?  Do you want the visitor to click on a specific button?

2) Write these down and then put them on your website stats program to track.  In Google Analytics you can do this through the Goals section or thru the Event Tracking section.  Either way, track them!

3) Monitor the stats monthly to see what goals are being met and which ones are not.  Of the ones that are not (and there will be those, believe me) – do some investigating to find out why they aren’t being acted on.  Maybe the graphic is too far down on the page.  Maybe the phone number isn’t easy to find on the website page.  Whatever it is, investigate.

Oh, and in case you don’t think you can track phone calls easily on a website, guess again.  Check into Google Voice.  You can use a FREE phone number provided by Google Voice on your website.  Forward it to your office phone and that’s that.  You’ve got a tracking of incoming phone calls from your website.

Although we’ve been using Google Analytics for the past many years it’s always good to look and see what other free website stats programs are available and how they stack up.

Google Analytics
Comparing  Google Analytics and Awstats
Comparing Google Analytics and StatCounter
Comparing Google Analytics and GetClicky
Comparing Google Analytics and Woopra

Awstats
Comparing Awstats to GetClicky
Comparing Awstats to Woopra
Comparing Awstats to StatCounter

StatCounter
Comparing StatCounter and GetClicky
Comparing StatCounter and Woopra

GetClicky
Comparing GetClicky and Woopra

Woopra

There are some FABULOUS statistics that you can get about the visitors to your website via the Google Analytics tool.  Let me give you a brief explanation of each section.

Benchmarking
Google explains “benchmarking” like this…”Based on the number of visits each site receives, sites of similar sizes are grouped together under three classifications: small, medium, and large. This way, you can compare yourself to other similarly sized sites.”

Basically, it gives you an idea of how your website is doing compared to others of the same size.  Of course, there are other factors to consider, the time of year, your industry, etc.  But at least you have a “benchmark” idea of where your site may be worse off than others in your size range.

Map Overlay
One of my very favorite stats on Google Analytics is the “map overlay”.  It gives me a detailed list of where my visitors are coming from.  It’s broken down to region, country, state and city.  And not only does it give you the places where the visitors are coming from, but it also gives you the keyword phrases the users typed in to find you!  There’s alot more information it also gives so check it out!

New vs. Returning
You may be working hard to get new people to your website.  You know, the first time visitors.  Google Analytics breaks it down for you by letting you know which visitors have been there before and which ones are new!  It’s a thing of beauty.

Languages
Are you getting visitors coming to your site who are French?  Do you want to attract a French demographics?  No?  Well, you’ll have to analyze why your website is doing that but at least this tool gives you the data on what language demographic you’re getting.

Visitor Trending
Here you can see “trends” on your site.  What days are the most popular?  Is your site bounce rate getting better or worse?  Are more people visiting more pages?

Visitor Loyalty
How many visitors come to the site once, twice or more?  How long do they stay?  How deep into the site do they go?  Lots of information here on this stat.

Browser Capabilities
What browsers are your visitors using?  Do the majority of them use Firefox?  What does your website look like in Firefox?  Maybe the majority of your visitors have a 1280×800 screen resolution.  What does your website look like in that resolution?  Fixing any of these problems may increase your conversion rate.

Network Properties
What ISP’s are your visitors using?  Are they on high speed?  Cable?  Satellite?  This many not matter but if your website has alot of Flash and graphics and loads up slowly, you may want to cut down the size of your pages so that slower service providers can accomodate.

Mobile
This is one of my favorite stats.  Because of the explosion of mobile use in the USA in the last year, it’s only natural to begin tracking how many visitors come to your website via a mobile device.   If your target audience is “on the go” then you may want to provide mobile coupons, interactive maps, easier forms, etc.

The concept here is to use the great information that Google Analytics gives you to improve your website.  Not only for the sake of the site, but for the sake of your business!

Years ago I used to send a PDF copy of the Google Analytics report to my clients.   I also sent ranking reports (remember when they were relevant?) – and what I learned was that my clients didn’t understand them.

As a good friend tells me quite often, “Oh, it gives me a headache!”.

So, although all those numbers and graphs are interesting and fascinating for me to read, to my clients, they just give them a headache!

I stopped sending them that information and I started sending them a short analysis of those reports.  That turned out to be better.  At least for my clients.

But, knowing what I know (or maybe I’m just a die hard geek) – I couldn’t get by in my business with that little bit of knowledge about my website statistics.  I want to know what all those numbers and details mean!  So, although I agree that many small businesses just need to know the basic facts, I still think it’s important to have some working knowledge of the terms and information that website analytics can give you.

The folks over at WebTrends created an excellent alphabetized glossary of all website analytics terms and their definitions.  So, without further ado, here’s the list of Website Statistics Terminology.

http://www.webtrends.com/Education/Glossary.aspx

What’s REALLY important when measuring website metrics and analytics?

Now that Google has officially announced that they will no longer accept any automation tools scanning their search engine for website rankings, some SEO firms and SEO webmasters are wondering what can they use for their Website Metrics and Analytics? Honestly, they should have been using other measurements way before today! But for SEO newbies here are some website metrics and analytics that you should be following, for yourself and your clients.

1) ROI (Return On Investment) – possibly the most important website metric to follow. Your report should show how much was spent on Internet marketing for the month and how much was made. Of course, you’ll have to know the average profit per sale and then track the sales.

2) Unique Visitors – how many unique (or new) visitors have come to the website that month? This number should increase from the beginning of the campaign. Of course, there will be dips but in general, the trend should be upwards. The more new pages and new keyword phrases the website adds, the more unique visitors will be coming to the website.

3) Leads – every website should have a way to measure leads. Measuring these through website metrics and analytics is fairly easy and I’m always surprised at how many websites do not take advantage of it. First, the website should have a form (not an email link) for every possible reason a user would need to contact. For example: If we’re talking about a dentist’s website, that site should have a standard “contact us” form, an “appointment” form, a “ask the dentist” form and an “insurance information” form. Of course, each form would then go to a separate “thank you” page. The SEO webmaster would then track these “thank you” pages. The idea here is to see which of these forms is being used the most. What is the target audience looking for and how can the site owner build on that?

4) Conversions – Yes, if the website generated 50 thank you pages in one month (that would be 50 leads) then of those 50, how many converted into sales? The average is 1% – 3%. These are a bit tricker to track since some conversions will take place via a phone call (can’t track that with website metrics and analytics) but you can ask the site owner to ask the caller “How did you hear about us?”.

5) Time on Page – Depending on the type of website you have, you may want to measure the time spent on your website pages. After all, if your website page is filled with information that you want to user to read but yet the average amount of time spent on that page is 5 seconds, well, they’re not reading that information. So, what do you (as an SEO webmaster) need to do to make that page more “reader friendly?”

6) Call to Action – every website page should have at least 1 call to action. Measuring this through website metrics and analytics is easy. The call to action (something that you want the viewer to do) can be measured through forms and click throughs. Maybe a call to action is “email us today” – how many visitors clicked on that specific link? If it’s a small number? Why? What can you do to improve that number?

7) Bounce Rate – this is one of my favorite website metrics to follow. A bounce rate is the percentage of people who came to a website page and left the website entirely. In other words, these visitors never ventured to other pages on the website. This is usually an indication that the website attracted the wrong kind of visitor. If your website was a storefront and you put books in your store window but your store sold shirts, the majority of visitors coming into the store would leave because they “thought” your store was selling books. If you have a high bounce rate (I consider anything over 50% to be high) then your website is essentially doing this very same thing.

Backlinks – how many more websites are linking to you this month than last month? What websites? What anchor text linking are they using? A very important website metric to know.

9) Social Media – your website metrics and analytics program should be able to tell you how many referrals you received from any of the social media programs such as stumbleupon, twitter, linkedin, facebook, etc. Is your social media marketing working for you? Test it!

Website rankings are just a very small part website metrics and analytics. Give yourself and your clients the best possible measurement of their website success!
Be an internet marketing firm your clients will be proud to be part of.