An essential, but often forgotten part of any good marketing plan is the analysis of it. For any business occupying a space in the crowded interweb, performing a regular in-depth site analysis is essential to digital marketing success. Without it, there is absolutely no way to tell whether your digital marketing campaigns are paying off or not!
Holding a finger in the wind, or going with your gut feeling that everything is ‘fine’ simply won’t cut it any more. Establishing the true facts and figures about your website’s performance will allow you to do more of what works, and stop doing anything that could be driving customers away.
However, before you can proceed with an in-depth analysis of your site’s performance, you will need to download or install a web analytics program onto your site (in fact, you probably already did this when you launched your website).
Analyzing the stats
Your analytics program should have uncovered some very interesting data for you that you can now analyze on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Some of the main stats to review include:
Unique Visitors
A unique visitor is someone who has made at least one visit to a page on your site during a specific time period (as per your report). These visitors are only counted once – hence the term ‘unique’.
You can expect these numbers are likely to rise and fall in line with any marketing activity you do and seasonal trends.
Returning Visitors
Someone who has visited your site previously and has come back again, this could be to any page within the site. Returning visitor numbers gives you a great idea of how authoritative and respected your site is within your industry. Keep a month on month tally of these figures to help identify seasonal trends or tie up with your marketing activity.
Traffic Sources
Shows you where your visitors are coming from, whether directly to your site, or from other websites or search engines. This will be a direct reflection of your digital marketing efforts as you’ll quickly be able to see a correlation between any web marketing you’re doing and the traffic this is sending to your site.
Bounce Rate
Number of people who left your site after only visiting the page they landed on. Anything above 40% should cause alarm and give you reason to perform further analysis in this area.
Time on Site
Average amount of time visitors spend looking around your site. Create informative content that will encourage visitors to stay and interact with your brand, rather than just trying to sell them a product or service.
Top Content Pages
The most popular pages on your site in terms of visits. Compare your most popular pages with the rest of your site to identify opportunities and weaknesses.
Keywords
The words and phrases visitors are entering to find your site within the search engines. Thorough analysis should be taken here in order for you to spot any keywords you may not have incorporated into your marketing plan.
