One of the best ways to track the effectiveness of your online marketing is with website traffic reports, or analytics. There are many resources for collecting website traffic data that vary widely in price and complexity. To get the most out of your website statistics, you should be tracking how the data reacts to various marketing campaigns and content changes within your site. Before you can get into advanced data analysis, though, you need some stats.
As I mentioned, there are a variety of traffic counting applications out there. It is my opinion that there are enough suitable free services that paying for one is probably unnecessary. Google Analytics and StatCounter are two of the most popular and easy-to-use traffic report generators, and both are free. There is also a good chance that your website hosting provider offers web analytics, either for free or for a minimal charge. GoDaddy offers site analytics for $2.99/mo for non-hosting clients, and free analytics reports for clients that use their hosting services. Each of these services provide the same general statistics and details about your website visitors.
The preferred web analytics service that we use at GetCreative is Google Analytics. On the first of every month we have traffic reports emailed to myself and each of our clients outlining their website traffic for the past month. These reports begin with an overview page which shows the main data that will be looked at within the report. The first two graphs show the number of visits and visitors to the site each day of the month, followed by small graphs displaying pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site and percentage of new visitors. This is followed by details about the source of website traffic; a pie chart shows the percentage of direct, search engine and referring sites traffic. A map overlay shows which countries your visitors are coming from, and a content overview shows the most popular pages on your site. Other details within the report include browsers and connection speed of visitor as well as specific traffic sources and top keywords searched.
In addition to reviewing the traffic reports on the first of each month, we take the time to check up on the performance of our clients’ sites about once a week to ensure marketing efforts are working effectively and to head off any problems or issues as early as possible. Implementing Google Analytics is done by inserting a few lines into the HTML of any of the pages you wish to be tracked. The number of websites you can track is unlimited (though there is a 5 million pageview limit per month), and you can track performance back as long as you have been using Analytics. Traffic reports can also be sent weekly or daily, and additional users can be created to allow my clients to view only their statistics at any time they wish.
Do you use another resource for tracking your website statistics? For questions or help using any of the services mentioned in this post, feel free to contact us.