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Understanding Website Analytics Metrics

Posted on: October 21st, 2013 by Walid Abou-Halloun
Categories: New Website and Technology. Tags: Website Analytics and What Is. Releted Products: New Website.

Understanding Website Analytics Metrics

The terms used in Analytics programs can be confusing. If you’re new to analytics, check out our outline in Part 4, Online Business 101 Series and the preceding article to this one, Why Do I Need Analytics? Here we break down the basic metrics used by all Analytics programs to give you a foundational understanding to begin the process of boosting your website profits.
Effectively using analytics is the key to boosting profits and the success of your online ecommerce store.

What Information Do I Need To Track?

Every website is slightly different and so the metrics you need to measure will depend on the type of business you own and what you want to accomplish with your website. The best thing is to discuss your needs with your website designer. With this in mind, there are some basic metrics that most businesses will use as a foundation.

Number of Unique Visitors

This is the number of unique individuals who have visited your page in the time frame specified. The obvious direction for this metric to go is up, up, up! The more people visiting your website the better.

Page Visits

‘Page visits’ refers to the number of actual pages clicked on by visitors. One visitor might click on 5 pages or just the 1. Website redesign can increase the number of page visits per visitor.

Time Spent

This is the average time a visitor spent browsing your website. Web designers may insist longer is better but the truth is whether you want this to be a long time or a short time will depend on the type of website you have. Blogs and news sites want this metric to go up. If your website is just for information like an address before someone visits your store, the time spent will be lower. Lower time is a good thing in this instance because you have provided information to your customer quickly.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the number of people who landed on your website and left within the first 2 minutes. They have effectively ‘bounced’ off your website. They arrived but didn’t find what they were looking for. You want this metric to go down, down, down. Some ‘bounce rate’ is normal. Anything under 50% is acceptable, a rate under 30% is admirable.

New Visitors vs Repeat Visitors:

Your goal for this metric will depend on whether you want to attract new visitors to your site or develop loyalty amongst your current customer base. Increasing return visitor % is always a good sign, as repeat customers are more likely to buy from you.

Source of Visits

If you are doing online or even offline marketing for your business website, the source of your visits will be of the utmost importance. You will be able to see exactly how many people came to your website from a particular URL ie: an online advertisement. If you want to increase your SEO potential, analytics will show you which words users are typing in to Google before landing on your website. If you have social media campaigns running, analytics will show you how many people are connecting to your website through these posts.

Conversion Rates

Ultimately it comes down to how many people are actually buying your product. Analytics will show you the number of people who were interested in a product (looking at it on a webpage) and the percentage of them who clicked through to buying it. Increasing the conversion rates for every product is the key to boosting profits on your website.

Analytics is something that is made to sound simple when really it’s not. If you’re confused about how to use analytics to grow your websites sales the best thing is to enlist the help of professional web developers. Contact Complete Cloud to enlist the help of a partner who will work with you on designing the most profitable metrics to use and developing a simple and automatic report in your inbox each week.

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