Analysis and Reporting

While the ultimate goal of most businesses when it comes to their online presence is to ultimately increase revenue, it is also very important to keep track of the “analytics” of your website for many reasons.

What is “Analytics”?

Simply put, Analytics is any system that keeps track and analyzes information about the visitors that come to your site, where they come from, what they do while at your site, and much more. Depending on the program you select the data can be fairly basic, or vast in scope. We generally recommend and use Google Analytics for most clients, because it is free, yet offers extensive and detailed information on site visitors that should be beyond what is necessary for the typical business.

What is important to us?

Visitors

Visitors is simply the number of individual visitors that come to your site, also referred to as unique visitors. This can be broken down in different ways, but for the most part, the analytics programs do not credit frequent, repeat visits as more than one visit. It is obvious why visitors are important. One of the goals of your website is to be seen.

Traffic Sources

Traffic sources helps break down where your visitors came from. You can see what search engine or website they came from, and even what page or which keyword they searched to end up at your site. This allows you to look at specific advertising and marketing campaigns and decide if they are effective, or if they need adjusting. For example, if you are spending $500 per month on an online ad, and it is only send 5 visitors per month, you may determine that the particular ad is not an efficient way to spend you budget. While visitors alone don’t determine where you should spend you budget it can help in making determinations.

Site Behavior

Site behavior tells you what people are doing once they come to your site. You may find that everyone that comes to your site leaves when they are at a particular page or that visitors are leaving immediately when they come to your home page or another page. Analyzing this information can allow you to make decisions on where you site could use improvements and also help you understand parts or you site that are working well.

Conversions

To me, this is a very important metric. When conversion tracking is properly set up, you can track your actual sales, leads or other important milestones back to the traffic source, or other helpful data like user demographics. This even more so than traffic sources or visitor information above lets you know where you should be spending your marketing budget.

Reporting

Using programs like Google Analytics can be overwhelming to those with little experience. At Chris Powell.net, we can break down what is important and deliver that information to you in a easy to read, executive summary. This can be done on a monthly basis, or more frequently depending on the needs of the client.