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Tracking the Success of Your Website - Google Analytics
By Andrew Seidel (c) 2007

How successful is your website? Do you really know how well it
is performing for your business?

Many website owners make the mistake of thinking that the more
traffic they get to their website the better, and they work
towards this end. It is better to focus efforts on bringing in
targeted traffic that will convert to sales or enquiries. To
understand more correctly how well a website is performing, and
who is visiting the website, a good website statistics package
is required, as well as an understanding of the data these
website reports produce.

With many website hosting packages free, website statistics are
available. However, the information is not always easy to
understand or doesn't always give you the information in a way
that is easy to understand.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is a great
application that Google provides absolutely free. It tracks all
activity on your website, not just visits through Google. All
you need is a Google Account, and FTP access to your website to
insert a small amount of code in your website, and away you go.
If you don't already have a Google account, I encourage you to
set one up as soon as possible! You can do so at:
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount . Not only will you
have access to Google Analytics, but having a  Google account
gives you a whole host of other tools.

Visitors

As a start, it is a good idea to find out how many visitors are
coming to your website. Visitors are broken down into new and
returning visitors. While it is great to attract new visitors to
your site, you should aim to see a decent percentage of
returning visitors as well, as this gives a good indication that
people find your site interesting enough to come back to.

Depth of Visit

How many pages are viewed during a visit to your website?

Length of Visit

How much time do visitors spend on your website? If they are
spending very little time on your site when you have an
information-rich site, then you need to start looking at the
navigational report to find out where you are losing them.

Keywords

The Keywords that people are finding your website through, are a
good indication of what keywords are performing well for you in
the search engines. Are the keywords that are displaying for you
truly reflective of what you offer? If not, then it is time to
revamp the content on your website.

Referrals

Which referrals drive the highest quality traffic? This report
lists activity coming via referrals from other websites. This is
useful for tracking links that you cannot control. You can gauge
the overall effectiveness and importance of PR activities,
partnerships, etc. The referrals are compared to the number of
visits, page views per visit, conversion rates and average value
per visit.

Navigation

Which navigation paths resulted in conversions during the visit?
For each navigation path, this report shows conversion rates and
the value per visit.

Exit Pages

From which pages do visitors commonly exit your site? This
report shows the number of exits from pages on your site. If you
notice a high number of exits for specific pages, it is time to
seriously analyze these pages and try to improve them, because
it is very likely that people are not getting the information
they expect or want.

Conversion data

Arguably this is one of the most important pieces of
information. Conversion data gives you a true understanding of
how successful your site really is.

Conversional goals can be set up through your Analytics
settings. Take time to think about what goals you want to track.
These may be sales or web enquiries you are receiving, or
specific pages in your website that you want to focus on. Keep
in mind that if your visitor contacts you by phone or fax, this
will not be reflected in the goal conversions. However, you can
set your contact page as being a goal to get a feel for how many
people are looking for your contact details.

By monitoring the changes in conversion rates for your primary
goals, you can monitor the overall effectiveness of website
changes, marketing roll-outs and other events.

Organic vs Pay-Per-Click comparison

How does paid search compare with organic search in driving high
quality traffic to my site? This report compares paid and
organic referrals with respect to number of visits, page views
per visit, conversion rates and average visit value.

Date Range

Throughout the report it gives you the ability to track your
website statistics between various date ranges. At this time it
only allows you to see a maximum of a month's data at a time. The
reports also allow you to compare data, so you can find out how
your site is tracking against a previous date period.

Beta Version

The current Beta which is just in the process of being released,
provides a lot more flexibility, and one of the most exciting
things about the new version is that it allows you to schedule
reports, daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. This is great news
as it makes the process of accessing your website reports even
easier.

Google Analytics Features

There are many other features that Google Analytics offers, and
it is worth spending the time having a good look at them and
trying to understand what they have to offer you. Alternatively,
speak to your webmaster or SEO specialist and get them to help
you understand how Google Analytics can help improve your
website performance. By having a better understanding of it, you
can potentially increase your profits significantly.

Final Note

When you analyze the data from your website statistics with the
intention of improving your site, or getting a good indication
of how your site is performing, it is important that you have a
decent snapshot of the data to work from, i.e. make sure that
you are not making assumptions based on the data of a single
day, as trends vary over time, and even from day-to-day.

IMPORTANT- never become complacent! Make sure you review your
website reports at least weekly or monthly--if not daily--to
make sure that your website is performing to your expectations.
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Andrew Seidel is the Director of Quantum Web Solutions,
specialising in web site design (http://www.quantumwebsolutions.com.au/)
and web site promotion (http://www.quantumwebsolutions.com.au/).
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