To understand how well your website is working for your business, you first need to understand some of the terminology. Then you’ll be better able to determine how to concentrate your time and efforts to attract visitors to your website. Let’s look at some terms and see how you can best use these site traffic statistics.
Hits – This one has been around since the beginning, and you’ll still hear a great many people say things like “How do I get more hits on my website?” The truth is, you really shouldn’t look at hit count for any meaningful measure of what’s happening on your site. Instead, you need to be thinking about Visits and Visitors.
Visits - Each time a user comes into a site, it is recorded as a visit. One user may visit a site several times in one day. The more visits your site gets, the more likely you are to generate business from it.
Visitors - This is a very important metric. Even if the same visitor enters your site several times in a day, it will record as just one unique visitor. All of the visits will get counted, however. So one visitor stat may yield multiple visit counts.
Page views – This is another very important measurement of how effective your site is, and how useful it is to your visitors. Another word for this is “stickiness.” This tells you if your site visitors are finding their way around, and whether they are locating other information of interest to them. Ideally, you are looking for lots of page views.
Bounce-rate - Bounce rate is shown as a percentage, and it indicates how quickly the visitor left your site. In other words, they came to your site and realized it wasn’t what they were looking for. They “bounced” right out of it again. Obviously, the lower the percentage, the better. That indicates that visitors have come to your site intentionally, or that once there, they found it interesting enough to stay and look around.
Referrals - A referral occurs when a visitor comes to your site from another. For example, if you run banner ads or have links on other sites, and someone clicks through to your site, that is a referral. The originating site is the referrer. When a user arrives at your site, referral information is captured, which includes the referrer URL if available, any search terms that were used, time and date information and more.
So, what does it all mean?
Your goal is to use SEM (Search Engine Marketing) in tandem with your other marketing efforts to increase your visitors. Growing your visitor count is key to growing your business through the web.
Google Analytics is the industry leader in helping you learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with your site. Using Google Analytics can provide insights into your web traffic patterns, keep a pulse on which keywords and campaigns are most effective, and determine what types of customers are coming to your site. This tool can help you fine-tune your site’s design to help decrease the bounce-rate and increase the conversion rate.
At Chad Allan, we work with Google Analytics to help our clients make informed site design improvements, drive targeted traffic, and increase conversions and profits. For more information about how we can help with your web marketing efforts, contact us today!