14.05 – Tracking Activity
Tracking website activity provides a wealth of information about your visitors, including their geographic location, the search engines and search terms they used, the entry points on your website, and the time they spend on various pages. This data complements the basic information gathered from orders, inquiries, and email contacts.
You can leverage this visitor data to optimize your website and content, improving the user experience and achieving your website goals. For example, if many visitors are entering your site through an inappropriate section, like the price list, instead of starting with the benefits of your product, you can adjust your keywords or make more visible links to guide traffic along the desired path.
Ensuring Accessibility and User Friendliness
It’s crucial to ensure your website is always accessible and user-friendly. Users are often impatient and will quickly move on if a site doesn’t work immediately. Regularly checking your site’s functionality can prevent this issue and retain visitors.
Utilizing Google Analytics
A valuable tool for measuring your website’s success is Google Analytics, available for free at Google Analytics. This tool tracks traffic from various sources, including email marketing, search engines, pay-per-click downloads, display advertising, and links from PDF documents. Google Analytics provides detailed reports on your website’s performance and visitor demographics, helping you make sense of the data and adjust your strategies accordingly.
Google Analytics is designed for marketers and business professionals, making it user-friendly even for those without technical expertise.
Key Traffic Measurements
Three main traffic measurements are essential for assessing the success of any website:
- Acquisition: The number of visitors to the site.
- Conversion: The number of visits that convert into sales.
- Average Spend: The amount of money spent by converted visitors.
Example of Website Traffic Monitoring
Monitoring these metrics weekly using graphs can highlight performance trends and identify areas for improvement. For instance, consider the following example:
- The vertical axis on the right shows the number of visitors (in thousands) for each of the preceding ten weeks. Although the overall trend is positive, a dip is noticeable between weeks 4 and 7. This calls for an investigation into possible changes, such as keyword ranking drops or increased competitor activity.
- The vertical axes on the left track conversions and average spend. A steady improvement in conversions suggests that the right audience is being attracted to the website and their visits are converting to sales, indicating effective keyword use. Average spend also shows a positive trend, with a significant surge between weeks 3 and 6, warranting further analysis to understand the cause.
By closely monitoring these metrics, you can continually optimize your website’s performance and enhance the user experience, driving more conversions and increasing revenue.
