Let’s run through a quick review of some of the key areas of website performance, organic & type-in traffic, & how to drive relevant visitors to business.
Here’s a quick overview of what analytics can tell you from visitor location, to interest profiles, to type-in traffic sources:
- Where traffic is coming from (e.g type-in traffic)
- How your traffic is converting
- Where your traffic is converting the best
- When the busiest times of the day and week are
- What attracts the most traffic
- What keywords people are using to arrive at your site
- What types of copy-writing techniques convert better
Google Analytics, a must have free tool that many people don’t seem to use, often enough. More people seem to find free company and questionable tools, sometimes mistaken for real tools like Google Analytics, which is unfortunate.
There are three main areas that you want to track in Google Analytics: tip: identify your type-in traffic & target for growth.
- Acquisition shows you how you obtain visitors, how many you obtain and where they come from.
- Behavior tells you how visitors behave once they land on your site, including what pages they most often visit and how long they stay on your site.
- Conversion illuminates if, when and where visitors take desired action on your site
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools)
Google gives internet marketers amazingly helpful tools and information in Google Search Console, like:
- there is malware affecting your site or there are 404 error pages
- there are broken links
- robots.txt files aren’t allowing Google to correctly access and index your site
- have a missing sitemap
The dashboard of your Google Search Console is where you find many of the most important pieces of data for your site’s online website statistics analysis; traffic type, source, keyword, & type-in traffic, etc..
It’s also the location where you as the webmaster can “talk to” Google.
Here you can do such things as:
- Set up geographical targets to let Google know your intentions for who you want to reach
- Set up Google Analytics and manage user set up + their level of authorization
Connect various Google accounts with Google Search Console, create a YouTube channel, or social media on behalf of your site. Using all these tools as part of an online website statistics analysis helps ID things like: Below are the things that really tell you what kind of traffic the site will see, brandable domain names don’t usually rank themselves, and is why automated business name generator sites are interesting and fun but not helpful to you business.
- HTML Improvements–This location explains any issues with your site titles, descriptions and tags so that your site can rank correctly in Google. It informs you of any errors so that you can fix them to enable searchers to find you more easily.
- Sitelinks–Google reads your site as an authority for certain keywords. Here it tells you which pages are connected with those keywords. This is also where you can remove a URL that shouldn’t be listed under that keyword.
- Search Traffic–Here you find the top keywords returned from your site in search results. You learn about your top keywords, top traffic-generating pages, as well as the number of impressions, clicks and the click-through rate (CTR) for those keywords and pages. When you have this data, you can focus on improving the pages that are ranking lower to get more traffic & type-in traffic to those pages via keywords searchers are using.
- Links to Your Site–This is where you find the domains that have linked to pages on your site. It also informs you of the number of internal links you have on pages on your site. This can help you keep an eye on domains that may be sending you “junk traffic” and increase the number of internal links on pages that you have on your site.
- Internal Links–Obviously, this informs you of the number of internal links you have in any of 1,000 pages on your site. This helps you see what pages need more internal links to encourage people to click around and stay on your site and assists Google in indexing your site correctly.
- Content Keywords–This gives you the most common keywords Google crawlers found on your site. If you see unrelated or unfamiliar keywords here, it’s most likely that your site has been hacked and had hidden keywords added to it.
- Site Errors–Here you will find a list of any errors Google bots have found over the last 90 days. These can be things like server errors or missing pages. Site errors can cause major traffic issues, so you should keep your eye on this in particular.
- Crawl Stats–This data shows you any issues crawlers are having on your site, specifically how quickly the pages can be crawled and if there are slow page loading times. You will see spikes here on this graph, but don’t worry about that–it’s normal. What you need to watch for is a major drop in crawling activity and long page loading times. If you see these, you will know there is an issue that you need to take care of. For example, you may have accidentally blocked content from being blocked through a Javascript or CSS.
- Fetch as Google–Google wants to read your site just like visitors do. Here you can make sure that bots are able to crawl your site in the way you mean for them to. You can locate and diagnose issues on both desktop and mobile here. o Blocked URL’s–Here you will be able to see if the bots can crawl each one of the individual pages on your site.
- Sitemaps--This is where you can test your sitemaps and see problems with ones you’ve submitted to Google.
Re-targeting
- Retargeting is one of the best methods of converting visitors. Re-targeting allows you to get a second chance to convert people who have visited your site
- Re-targeting is smart marketing because: o Increases marketing efforts
- Provides lower-cost marketing campaigns o Improves brand awareness o Increases brand awareness
- Drive new visitors into sales funnel
Social Media ROI Tracking
There are many great tools that you should consider to help you get the clearest picture of what your social media ROI really is, as part of your online website statistics analysis . (we are not endorsing any one tool or tools, contact us to discuss further). Here are a few to get you started:
- Google Analytics – must have and there no cost
- Cyfe, I am trying their free version now and this seems really helpful
- Try a few analytics dashboards to find the one right for you.
The following two will have additional details provided, in a future post, as we research and relate to our business. But, these are metrics that often raised, so worth getting familiar with.
- Customer Lifetime Value Calculator
- Cloud BI
- KISSmetrics
Facebook Pixels
- If you are looking for a way to improve your paid traffic, you definitely need to check out the new Facebook pixel. By adding one Javascript code to your site, you can:
- Build Custom Audiences from your website for retargeting
- Optimize your ads for conversions
- Track conversions and attribute them back to specific ads
Contact us with any questions or to set up a consult: