Website Statistics You Should Monitor and Analyze

One of the advantages of online businesses over traditional businesses is the ready availability of visitor information. Data like the source of your website traffic, the bounce rates and the conversion rates can help you improve your website and get more conversions.

Although your web host can provide you the raw data, I recommend using analytics tools for their ease of use and convenience. Analysis of some basic statistics can help make sound business decisions about small business SEO and other professional website design aspects. Here is a short list of key data you should carefully analyze:

Search terms

The words or phrases that your potential customers use to find your website are called search terms. It is important to keep a close eye on search terms as they not only provide keywords for effective SEO and PPC advertising, but also give you an idea about latest trends and help you find new potential markets.

Entry pages

These are the first pages that visitors to your site land on. These may or may not include your home page. The pages that show up in this list are well optimized. If this list does not include some pages that you expected to be there, it indicates that you need to work on optimization of those pages.

Page views

Every time a visitor views a page on your website, it is counted as a page view. You can improve your website traffic and ultimately the conversion rates by making efforts to encourage other relevant sites to link to the pages with highest number of views and ensuring that these pages lead to your sales pages.

Exit pages

These are the last pages viewed by the visitors before leaving your site. The information about exit pages can help you find out pages that need to be improved to keep visitors on your website for longer duration and direct them to your sales pages.

Referrers

Information about the websites and search engines referring maximum number of visitors to your website is very helpful. For instance, if most of the traffic to your website comes from online encyclopedias or educational resource sites like Wikipedia, you can search for such other sites and offer them good quality, optimized content or video to further increase traffic at your business website.

Unique visitors

Benchmarks are important to measure success of any strategy. The number of unique visitors coming to your website is such a benchmark. If the number is low, this indicates need to take measures like use of more effective keywords, other SEO methods or a PPC campaign.