Analyzing Your Website Statistics and Metrics

Recently, our agency was faced with making a change in our website stats provider. With this change, I was forced to analyze our old system and the new system in order to be confident in the change.

Without spending an inordinate amount of money for an analytics system, a basic web stats service can help provide your company with an invaluable marketing and operational tool.

One reason why online media and advertising has made up so much ground on traditional advertising in the past five years is the metrics and conversion tracking abilities. Virtually everything you do online is tracked by the website you visit and the products you buy. While most companies insist upon a privacy policy of not disclosing your IP address, they are still very aware of when you are on and what you are doing.

This leads me to companies taking advantage of the online medium's ability to track the effectiveness of your website and to more accurately define your website's demographic.

Here a few statistics to look at when viewing the past 30 days of activity on your site: (in no particular order)

1. Monthly and Daily Traffic: A fundamental stat to understand the market reach of your site. How many visitors are you averaging per day? Per month? First understand how many people are viewing your site and then move forward in tracking how many of those convert into your desired outcome (contact form, sales call, eCommerce sale)

2. Referrers: These are the sites that refer visitors to your site. Your biggest referrers are going to be the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). After that, any place that has a link to your site would be a potential referrer. The referrer stat is extremely helpful when you have an advertising and marketing budget. It allows you to see how many people were directed to your site.

3. Search Engine Phrases: As one of my favorite website stats, this tool shows you what people have searched for on the search engines before they reach your site. This tool is helpful because it helps target keywords in the future and deciphers how people perceive your product or service. For example, one popular service for us is "website design," but our web stats have shown us that more people search for "web design" so we have refocused our search engine optimization strategies to target this.

4. Top Pages, Exit Pages and Visitor Path: These three stats attribute to your visitors user behavior. Top pages will tell you the most popular pages on your site, allowing you to focus on optimizing those sections of your site. Exit pages will allow you to understand which pages people are leaving your site from and which pages need improvement. Visitor path brings the prior two together. It will tell you the path people took on your site, from page 1 to page 7. Site architecture and flow of your site can be improved to define a clearer path for your visitors.

These are just four areas for you to look at. Most stats system have enough graphs, charts and numbers to make your head hurt. Start slow and look at your traffic and then start to drill down.