There are many statistics you can track for your website and it can be confusing as to which ones really matter. And while the answer for you is probably “it depends on your needs” there are certainly some stats that everyone should watch. Some of these are stats you can easily be glanced at for reassurance that there are no new big problems on your site. Others answers questions about the effectiveness of your marketing and content.
1. Trend lines
Analytics data is most reliable when you’re looking at trends. If you see any number taking a big jump up or down you know that you have something you need to investigate. For example, if visits from your best lead generating site take a sudden dive, you need to look again at that site and the link they have given you. Perhaps the site has gone down or been redesigned.
2. Inbound links/traffic sources
This stat answers the following simple questions: Where are people coming from when they visit your site? Is that link you just requested from your professional association providing you with any traffic or leads? Are the ads you’re paying for bringing you any traffic? Are links in your tweets sending viewers your way? How about your LinkedIn profile and business page? Is there someone you should thank for their new link to your site?
3. Keywords
What keywords are people using to find your site? Are they the keywords you optimized your site for? Are they the keywords you’re bidding on for your ad campaign? Are there keywords you didn’t expect and around which more content could be created? If you’re a new business you’ll certainly want to see an increasing number of searches for your company name. If you’ve been around for a bit, you’ll be interested in seeing what the more atypical, but accurate, keywords are. Those are clues to new terms you could be optimizing for or bidding for in your PPC campaign.
4. Content
What’s your most popular content? What pages might be acting as your home page? Is it time to update some of your more popular pages? Is that great new page you added to your site getting any traffic? Are your landing pages getting high numbers? Is there a page drawing a lot of traffic that needs a new call to action on it to make it pay off even more? Is there a page that you just threw up in a hurry that’s getting a lot of traffic and should be re-written and updated? Did your last email generate the traffic you expected to your new offer page?
5. Bounce rate
I want you to spend some real time with this stat. This tells you what pages are drawing visitors that then immediately flee from your site. Don’t panic if you have a high bounce rate for repeat visitors to your blog entries because you can expect those visitors to come, read your latest entry, and then leave without viewing the content they read last week. But if the landing page for your ad has a 50 percent bounce rate you know you’re in trouble. That’s when you dig a little deeper to see if the keywords and ad copy bringing people to that site are appropriate. You look at the content on your landing page and look at your call to action to see if it’s good enough to draw people deeper into the site. You look at your content and design and navigation. You ask someone else to look at your landing page. You look at the time people spent on that page to try to determine if they might have read it or not. You add related links to pages deeper in your site or change your offer or do something else to draw visitors further into your site.
6. Number of page views
This can be a confusing stat. If you’ve just redesigned your site it can be very hard to know if a higher number of page views is a good or bad sign. It might be that visitors are being drawn deeper into your site or they could be clicking around because they are hopelessly lost. I’d recommend some usability testing to be sure your visitors are leaving your site informed rather than frustrated. This stat might be most important to site owners who are moving visitors through a sales funnel on their site or who have a goal of educating their visitors. You might know that the more interaction someone has with your site, the more likely you will make a sale, get them to take another action, or change their opinion.
7. New visitors
This number won’t be exact, but you’ll want to look at trends again. Any big drop is a reason for concern and investigation. If you have new site you definitely want to see this number trending upwards. If you’re looking for visitor loyalty or you know that your buyers tend to do a lot of research before they buy, then you may be happier with higher return visitor numbers. But for those trying to grow a business, you’ll want plenty of new visitors. And you’re going to want to know what content is drawing them in.
Note: Absolute unique visitors is a more accurate metric than new visitors. But since we’re looking at trends at this point, don’t worry too much about that.
8. Internal search terms
If you have search on your site, this report can be full of insights for you. You can find terms you didn’t expect people to be using, you can get an idea of what areas of your site are hard to locate through navigation, you can discover content your visitors are expecting to see but aren’t finding. It can be fun to discover who the stars in your company are by looking at the number of searches for them by name. Are there search terms that you should turn into keywords for optimizing your site?
9. Time on page/time on site
Reporting tools can’t compute the time a visitor spent on the last page they viewed (because there is no subsequent page visit to measure against) but this is still a useful metric. You’ll get an idea of which pages capture a reader’s interest and which ones they skip right past. Do the numbers match your expectations? How about the expectations of your sales team? Time on site can be a measure of how engaging your site is, but it can also indicate people coming to your site and confidently selecting links only to be confused by them and less confidently moving to another link until they give up.
10. Goals and conversions
I saved the best for number ten. You have goals for your site, right? All these stats mean very little if no one coming to your site actually makes a purchase, a call, a comment or whatever action it is you want readers to take. Google Analytics and other tools allow you to track many of your goals. So you’ll want to look at goals such as number of people seeing the thank you page for signing up for your newsletter or the confirmation page for a purchase. Or you might want to track the number of downloads of your most recent report or the number of people who viewed a video past the 2 minute mark. You can usually take a look at conversion funnels from analytic packages, too, and discover if there are any places where you have too many people abandoning that funnel.
11. Social media posts
I haven’t found any tool that tracks this as well as I would like so this is a metric you should track but might have trouble tracking. You’ll want to know if you’re being talked about and what people are saying. You should have specific social media goals that you can measure and track. Are you looking for referrals, links, positive mentions, leads or an additional method of service? You can also get a few clues as to what sites/media you should be tracking after investigating your traffic sources. If you’re seeing a lot of traffic from one social source then you certainly want to monitor it carefully. Most social media sites have tools for that. Feedburner can be helpful in tracking RSS feeds. Your blogging tool most likely has some reporting feature that will let you track the number of comments per blog entry, at least. Facebook provides stats for fan pages. Socialmention.com is another tool you might try to follow the social media world’s interest in your site or your product.
There are other stats you can track and which provider you with more specific and deeper insights. But these should give you a good overview of how your site is performing.
