5 Web Analytics to Focus On
The intensity of competition in the practice of online business makes it mandatory to have a means to track the various metrics by which its success is measured. The sheer number of websites is quite overwhelming and the constant change in the parameters by which the search engines operate with regards to the ranking and site optimization necessitates a clear understanding of web analytics by the small business owner.
Web analytics is actually the means by which the usage of the internet is measured, understood and optimized. This is achieved by collating, measuring, analyzing and reporting internet data. All these data would be with reference to the website you have set up for your online business. Actually, there are quite a number of web analytics tools including Google Analytics (which is free to use) as well as Woopra. We will take a close look at these two tools:
- Google Analytics: This tool is quite simple to use and has a number of features while providing a lot of data.
- Woopra: This tool also has a useful and feature rich interface. It provides you with live chat features as well as real time information.
- Crazy Egg: This is a heat map tool that helps you to determine the exact items on your web page that are drawing attention from the visitors. It helps in optimizing your landing page and web forms particularly with regards to the placement of call to action links.
- Click Density: This also provides similar functions as the Crazy Egg.
In using a web analytics tool, it is important to know the very important metrics to focus on. We will take a close look at five of such web analytics:
1. Unique Visitors: This is one of the most important metrics in web analytics. The number of unique visitors you have means that number visited your site at least once. A low unique number count could mean that your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities are not yielding much dividends and need to be improved upon.
2. Traffic Sources: The sources from which visitors are coming to your site is very important as it will help you determine just where to focus on in promoting your site in the future. Sources could include search engines like Yahoo!, Google or Bing. Social media like Twitter, Facebook or MySpace are also like sources.
3. Referring Keywords: These are the keywords or phrases that were searched for on search engines, leading to the visit to your site. If the keywords are the wrong ones or not related to your industry, then you have to revisit your SEO work.
4. Top Content: There are sometimes pages on your site that attract more traffic than others. This could provide you with the necessary template when adding new pages to your site as well or redesigning the existing pages which need changes.
5. Location: You can also determine the geographical area where the majority of your traffic is emanating from. This could help you in shaping your content for optimization.
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