Your website traffic stats will tell you a lot about how successful your marketing efforts are. There is a wealth of information available to you, and learning to watch these key stats will help you understand how to improve your site’s performance.
Knowing what your stats are telling you helps you know what changes you need to make, to more effectively attract and engage your target audience.
Not long ago, I wrote a post about the basics of understanding Google Analytics. The seven important website traffic stats below can be found in Google Analytics reports as well as reports generated by any other decent stats program.
Seven Important Website Traffic Stats
1) Unique Visitors – this stat tells you how many different people have visited your website or blog. Repeat visitors will not be counted more than once, so this number reveals whether your traffic is growing or declining over time.
2) Geographic Location of Visitors – this tells you what countries your visitors are coming from. This is very important to your marketing efforts. If your site is promoting a home business opportunity available only in the USA, and you find you are getting a substantial number of visitors from other countries, you might want to consider adding and promoting related products and services that have a worldwide appeal and reach (for example, for network marketers, MyLeadSystemPro).
3) Incoming Search Terms – this very important web stat tells you what keywords that people searched on and clicked to find your site. This will give you a great idea of related keywords that you might want to focus on, as well as highlight how effective your SEO efforts are.
4) Referring Sites – this tells you what sites have links to you that people have clicked. You can discover where your traffic is coming from, and whether it’s from articles you’ve written or maybe someone has recommended your content. An excellent way to judge the popularity and appeal of your content.
5) Pages Visited – find out which of your pages and posts are getting the most visits. Discover what pages and posts are getting no visits at all, and consider building backlinks to those pages to help them get ranked higher and draw more visitors.
6) Entry and Exit Pages – these website traffic stats tell you what pages your visitors are landing on first when they visit your site, and which pages they are leaving from. Use this information to your advantage. Put your best offers or pitches on the most frequent entry pages, and consider ways to improve the content on the most frequent exit pages to help keep visitors on your site.
7) Errors – this report reveals problems like broken links and content that is otherwise inaccessible. Make it a point to fix these problems, as many visitors will just leave if they encounter a “page not found” error while clicking around your site.
Your website traffic stats can seem daunting at first. Take time to analyze them and learn what they mean, because they can provide you with valuable knowledge that will help you improve your marketing and sales efforts over time.
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About Eldon Beard
Eldon,
All of these are great metrics to monitor to improve your blog. I’d like to add one that I think is most essential, that being conversion or subscribers. Getting traffic is great but if you want to build a loyal following you need to convert random visitors into subscribers.
Thanks for the insight!
Lead conversion and tracking subscribers is definitely important, and is a more advanced function that any serious marketer will want to implement when the time is right. Thanks Dewane!
Hi Elton,
Many thanks for sharing your tips it is so important to understand how to read your analytics. I agree with you it is very important to know what sites are referring your site. It can be very interesting to see how effective social media is for your business. Take care Rosemary
Thanks Rosemary, appreciate your comments!
Very good info, here, Eldon.
Tracking statistics is not the most exciting thing to do for many internet marketers. But making money online is very exciting.
In order to optimize your efforts to make money online, though, you have to track the stats! If you don’t know where traffic is coming from or where it like to go, you’ll just keep spending money and time on things that are not tracking well, while disregarding those that are!
We always think we know what will work, but only statistical tracking will confirm or deny what we think.
Thanks David, interesting that I’ve often found that what I thought would work the best didn’t do as well as I expected. This is why tracking the stats is a must for serious online marketers. You have to find what works and ramp it up.
Hey Eldon,
Thanks for the great information. For a long time I have known that there the stats within Google Analytic’s was telling me more than I understood. Your breakdown of the different categories makes a lot of sense and opens up a whole new world of knowledge.
I had built a spreadsheet to track all the statistics from my site, but was not putting it to good use. I will be now!
One question, what does “Bounce” mean in the big picture?
David
David,”bounce” is a measure of how long people stay on your site and how many pages they visit. If they just stay a few seconds and leave, your bounce rate is 100%. If they stay a bit and click through to other pages on your site, it goes down significantly. It’s an indicator of how compelling and engaging your content is.
There are other things to consider too. Sometime you get ranked for long tail keyword phrases that aren’t really relevant to your content, and someone clicking on your link in a search might be looking for something else entirely. In that case, they will probably stay a couple seconds and click away, bounce = 100% in that case.
If you have a blog, and write often, you’ll get a lot of visitors from obscure long tail searches who are looking for something else and leave quickly. You have to take all this into account. Overall, I use bounce rate as a general measure, but don’t obsess over it.