Working Out Where Your Website Sucks

Just because you build it, it doesn’t mean they will come. The honest truth is that the majority of web sites out there suck. That doesn’t mean the designs are necessarily bad, it just means that the websites’ owners don’t have a good grasp on why and where their website isn’t performing as they had hoped.

Think about it: How do you know how successful your web site really is unless you have data that is measurable? You don’t. You may have a vague idea, but you don’t have enough of the big picture. Web analytics, or should I say good web analytics will give you the big picture.

1. Know if Your Visitors Are Going to Your Key Pages
Pages that you want your visitors to go to and make a sale, give a donation, sign up for something e.t.c. are your key pages. With a good stats application you can tell at a glance what your top performing pages are, as well as your worst performing pages.

2. Know if Your Visitors are Going Through Your Sales Funnel
Using good web analytics will mean you can see time periods of your choosing that will highlight visitor behavior. You may find that you have a lot of visitors to your home page but they leave fast, meaning you have a high bounce rate. Web stats won’t tell you why people leave but a high bounce rate indicates that they found you through an entry way but you’re site was not ‘as advertised’ when they arrived. This is why it is pointless to write content that is not targeted – because customers that do not convert are sales that do not happen. Web stats will tell you what your conversion rate is.

3. Quickly Know Your Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is calculated as the number of visitors per month divided by the number of visitors that actually did what you specifically wanted them to do [e.g. buy product] multiplied by 100. One thousand visitors with ten also as buyers will mean a sales conversion rate of 1%. Using Google Analytics will mean that you don’t have to use a calculator – it’s really easy to see your goals and your conversions at a glance.

4. Easily Set Up Goals
Setting up goals for your website is not only a marketing campaign must-do, it is an easy way to evaluate the success or failure of areas of your website. You need to know if your visitors are actually landing on your landing pages, if they sign up for your newsletter or promo, or any other page that you want to funnel traffic to.

Google Analytics makes it likely easy to set up goals that are trackable. For example, if you want to track how many people sign up for a special promo on your site, the thank you page after the sign-up is your end goal. You start off your tracking funnel by selecting the pages that you have set up to lead visitors to sign up. By setting up goals can easily see if people drop out and do not go through to your intended end goal page.

5. Long Term Feedback is Vital for Site Health
If you notice that your website isn’t getting many visitors, or that bounce rates are high you’ll know it’s time to do some search engine optimization on your website. You might have a content issue and need better OnPage search engine optimization, or you might not have enough good quality links bringing in traffic.

There are many web traffic stat applications available that can help you get a really good grasp on what is happening on your website. They range from fees in the thousands to free. I like free and especially when it is from Google because I know it’s good stuff.

You may be wondering why Google offers a free service that is comparable to high cost solutions, well the answer is that the analytics part of data gathering links in very nicely with the advertising Adwords, money generating part of Google. They are giving us this freebie hoping that we will make good use of their paid advertising capability to drive traffic to our websites. There is method to their madness after all.

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