The Top 5 Statistics You Have To Know For Your Website

The Top 5 Statistics You Have To Know For Your Website


By Dave Wedge  |   

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There are now over 1 billion websites on the Internet according to traffic monitoring sources. This is getting on for four times as many as there were in 2010, by any standards that is enormous growth.

This means that whatever market you are in you probably have a lot of website competition, and you can expect it to keep getting ever more competitive.

Your website is a complete waste of time, effort, and money - if you don't attract visitors and retain them long enough to take action. It's hard work getting visitors to your website if you want free traffic, and it can be very expensive if you are paying for it.

Either way you need to be very sure that you make the most of the traffic you do get. Otherwise it is rather like running the bath without putting the plug in, no matter how much is coming in you won't get much of a result.

Remarkably few website owners actually track what their website visitors do or what attracted them to their site in the first place, and understanding this can make a massive difference to your website success.

When you definitively know this information you can make way more from your marketing and advertising, and you can modify your content and site layout to maximize your income.

As an example if your site is about pets you may think most of your visitors are looking for information or products related to dogs and cats, and your website content would be set up accordingly. If it turned out that more visitors were actually interested in rabbits or birds would you want to make some quick changes to your site?

So you need to measure where your visitors are coming from and establish what they are looking for. If you don't know the basic statistics here you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

The first step is to get a tool which provides you with the capability to measure what I am about to take you through. I highly recommend that you set up Google Analytics, it is free and very powerful, and will provide everything you need.

Each of the following sections outlines a key piece of information to measure, pull these together and you will be in a great position to beat your competition and start to dominate your market.

If you are running paid advertising such as Pay Per Click this data is essential to have or you are likely to be wasting a lot of money.

Traffic Source

The information given to you in Google Analytics under 'Traffic Sources' is very important. It tells you where your visitors came from, ie how they found you.

This tells you what marketing and advertising effort is working. It will split out social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook etc, and show links from other sites, as well as showing you how much traffic specific adverts brought in.

You will be able to see how listings on directory or advertising sites such as Yell.com are performing, and whether any activity you may have in forums or on other blogs is having any impact.

If you are putting effort in to search engine optimization (SEO) activity you will also be able to see how well this is doing, and how much organic search traffic you are getting from Google and the other search engines, it will also show you which search terms brought visitors to your site

Device

It is no surprise that websites are receiving more and more traffic from mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. As these devices get more powerful and better designed for surfing websites this is a trend that can only increase.

Analytics will tell you how much of your traffic comes from desktop computers and from mobile devices.

Do you know how your website looks on a mobile device? If not you should go and check. It should be what is known as 'responsive', this means that it scales automatically according to the device it is being displayed on. This is the difference between it being usable or having the visitor give up and leave immediately.

So if your website renders badly on mobile devices, and you can see that you are receiving a significant volume of your traffic from them, you now know that you need a responsive version of your site.

Bounce Rate

This measures how many of your visitors exit your website from the same page through which they enter. You can see this for every page on your site.

Unless your objective is to send them somewhere else straight away, eg off to an external site where you have an offer, then a high bounce rate is generally a bad thing. It tells you that you are not engaging your visitors.

Maybe your visitor found what they were looking for straight away, but if not you just lost a visitor who will probably never return.

Only you know exactly what you want your visitors to do, and if it is to go to another page on your site to buy something or maybe become a subscriber you can see here how well each of your pages are working to achieve this.

If you are getting a high bounce rate that you don't want the message is clear, you need to have better content or copy writing on the page to engage your visitors.

Also be aware that Google is less inclined to rank sites with high bounce rates, it is a signal to them that you have poor content and are not giving visitors what they are looking for. This will make you much harder to find in the search engines.

Behavior

This section tells you which pages the visitors originally landed on and which ones they visited.

You may be surprised at which pages are getting the most traffic, or conversely which ones are not doing well. From this information you can make changes and better utilize the traffic to take the actions you want.

All your top visited pages should have an easy to find 'call to action' so that you can make the most of the traffic you do get.

Average Visit Duration

Obviously you will normally be looking to engage your visitors for as long as possible, particularly if you want them to come back.

So if this statistic shows that a lot of visitors only stay for seconds or a very short time, you know you need to make some changes.

As with the Bounce Rate statistic your site's overall average visit duration also affects your SEO, another good reason to have really good content.

Summary

Unless you understand these traffic statistics you will never get the most out of your website. If you can't measure it you can't manage it.

Of course you will need to put a little time and effort in to this, but it really will pay dividends and can give you the advantage over your competitors.

If you want to make more of your website and your marketing activities, visit http://youralternativefuture.com now for many more free articles and reports.

Dave is a successful consultant who has held senior positions in corporations all around the world. He has clients from start up businesses through to large international companies who he assists with websites and strategy. One of his current clients is a dragon from the Dragons Den TV series.

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