Google offers a list of incredible tools for making the web easier, faster and better. One amongst them is their Analytics tool. Opuscule codes this magical statistical data javascript right into each client’s website to allow them to view their visitor’s habits. We show you how to access these reports and what they mean for your website, but few clients ever take full advantage of it.
Today I would like to give you a little rundown of some of Google Analytic’s incredible features and reports, and how they can help your website.
This particular report represents a basic overview of the period November 2, 2008 to December 2, 2008. Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4.
On the top of the Dashboard page, there is a bar graph that represents each day’s visitors when hovered over. Beneath that is the Site Usage data. They had 560 visitors during that 30 day period. And those 560 people looked at 1,842 pages, which means that visitors to this website looked at an average of 3.29 pages before they left.
This is a VERY IMPORTANT NUMBER, this “3.29 pages/visit.” Opuscule is running analytics on over 50 websites and this number is the average amongst them all. Knowing information like this might make you rethink your strategy of having that clever Flash intro page, or a minimal home page, right? More on this later.
The bounce rate is 60.89% – which means that 60.89% of visitors quickly left the site after navigating to a certain page. This happens often if you accidentally click on a banner ad and a new window opens then you close it immediately.
People spent an average of about 2 minutes on the site and a third of them were new visitors. All of these, including this category, are expanded on individual pages.
This second page goes all over the info we just went through, but adds what kind of browsers your visitors are using and their connection speeds. Knowing connection speeds may give you a different outlook of the large images you want to include.
The third page shows a pie chart of from where the visitors were coming from. Having 43.21% of your visitors come from search engines is pretty good. It is the largest precentage compared to Direct Traffic and Referring Sites. Beneath that it reports which sites exactly your visitors came from, facebook.com being one of them there. This stresses the importance of your backlinks and social networking efforts.
The third page also shows which keywords people are using through google to find your website.
Page four shows the top five list of pages people visit by popularity and in what order. Here the Home page is most popular, by far, with the About, Services, Calendar and finally Contact pages coming up.
What is good to pull from this data is that if people are visiting an average of 3.29 pages, they’re not making it to your contact page. This is part of the reason some websites have their phone number and address prominently displayed on each page. Knowing this information could lead us to more carefully hand-hold the user through your website, where you want them to go.
Maybe we rearrange the menu order, or put images or boxes that highlight the contact page especially, in an effort to get them there.
This minor report as shown is just a small representation of the data that google analytics provides. We can use this information to track your visitors and adjust your site to guide them to what you want them to see and keep them coming back.
Opuscule is now offering a Digital Spring Cleaning package for small businesses where we will add this Google Analytics code for your website. Contact your web design experts in New York for small business.
