Visitor Analysis and Google Analytics

It's frequently stated that the three most important rules of website management are Analyse, Analyse and Analyse!

It's surprising how many people don't analyse their visitor statistics when you consider how easy it is, and how many software options there are available.

For years, Analog, AW Stats and Webalizer have been the market leaders in the website visitor stats market. But all of these have been largely annihilated by Google Analytics. Google Analytics offers much more configurability, and much better analysis and data presentation than any of the competitors, so it's the one which we recommend and is the one that we use for all of our Standard Package clients.

But what can you analyse and what can you learn from it?

Well aside from any advanced options, your stats can give you essential details of how your site is working.

For a start, how many visitors you are getting. If you are getting no visitors, you know you have serious problems. Without looking at your stats, you might not realise if you have no visitors.

If the number of visitors is decreasing over time, that could indicate problems.

Your visitors stats can also show you which pages your visitors are going to, and which are your most popular pages. Using this information, you could create more similar pages to try to attract more visitors. Or if the goal of your website is to get people to contact you, you can find out how popular your contact page is and make modifications, if necessary, to make it more popular. It's no good getting lots of visitors if none of them are reaching the "goal".

You can find out where your visitors are coming from too. If you're not getting any visitors from search engines, this is a clear sign that your web designer hasn't submitted your website to search engines. This means your website has probably been a complete waste of money.

If you're not getting the majority of your visitors from search engines, chances are that the search engines don't like your website and you are in desperate need of search engine optimisation.

Not only can you find out whether your visitors are coming from search engines, you can also find out what they searched for on the search engine that enabled them to find your site.

If the most common thing that people are searching for is your company name, then it's unlikely that your website is going to generate many new customers. Most of your visitors already know about you. This means there is work needed in optimising your website for other keywords.

You can also see the other search phrases that people are finding your website with. This can give you ideas for new keywords for optimising your site, and can also show if the optimisation you've already done is producing any results.

But the key benefit of using visitor stats is that you can make changes to your website and then see the difference before and after. Different tactics produce different results on different websites so you can't just make a change and assume it will work. A change that you hoped would produce positive results may produce the opposite effect, or have unforeseen side effects. If you can see this in your stats, you can change it back. Otherwise you'd be carrying on blindly.

If your web designer doesn't let you view your stats, you should change to one who does. You wouldn't drive a car with your eyes closed, so don't get a website without visitor stats.

Contact us today to get proper analysis of your website.