Numbers that Really Count

The purpose of a Web site is to bring lots of traffic to your site, right? Wrong. The purpose of a Web site is not to simply bring people to your site, but draw in a targeted audience that translates into a high conversion rate (customers). If you are attracting a lot of visitors to your site, but not gaining a broader customer base your Web site is not doing all it can for you. A Web site can be a useful tool to generate new customers and establish brand recognition of your business, but you must know how to use it to create the highest return for your investment.

To determine if your online marketing campaign is successful, you cannot simply rely on the number of people that visit your site or the number of hits that your site generates; these numbers do not tell you how your site is actually performing. Rather, you must analyze data that tells you where people are coming from and how they’re using your site. This information will help you determine if your site is meeting your marketing goals.

Some key areas that you need to analyze to determine your Web site’s performance are:

• How many unique visitors are coming to your site?
• Where are they coming from?
• How did they find your site?
• What keyword phrases did someone use to find your site?
• What are they doing once they’re there?
• How many people filled out a form or took an action?

Analyzing the data from all three of these questions will help you will help you determine if your site is meeting the needs of your visitors.

How Many Unique Visitors are Coming to Your Site?
While it is important to consider the number of visitors that your site receives, it is important to understand that these numbers can be misleading. First of all, you need to make sure that you are counting the number of unique visitors. It is important to distinguish unique visitors, as sometimes the same visitor will view your site several times or people will end up on your site accidentally and leave shortly after landing on your site. If several people do this, it can easily inflate the number of people you think are visiting your site.

Secondly, you need to understand that site traffic alone is not an indicator of your Web site’s success. It is an indicator of your Web site’s accessibility on the Web. Be aware that your site may be generating a lot of irrelevant traffic; that is, people who end up on your site that are not looking for your services. For this reason, it is important to look at where your visitors are coming from, how they found you and what they’re doing once they’re on your site. This information will provide you with the comprehensive data you need to determine the success of your Web site.

Where are Visitors Coming From?
Once you’ve determined how many unique visitors your site attracts, it is important to understand where these people are coming from. Tracking software can help you determine if people being directed to your site by search engines, back links, or direct hits (manually typing in your URL). This information can tell you which search engines and Web sites are directing traffic to your site. It can also tell you which aspects of your site people are most interested in by tracking the key terms that are bringing people to your site.

Understanding how your visitors are getting to your site can help you further determine the success of your online marketing campaign. This information can help you further develop a strategy to bring in the group of people that you are targeting for your services as you can determine where your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and back link strategies are weak and where they’re strong.

What are Visitors Doing Once They’re on Your Site?
Another aspect of understanding your traffic statistics is determining what visitors do once they land on your site. You can track how long visitors are spending on your site, which pages get viewed the most, the click path of your visitors and the last page visitors view before leaving your site.

How long visitors spend on your site is important because it helps you determine if your site meets the expectations of the people who end up there. For example, if your site is optimized for very general key words relating to law, someone looking for law schools may end up on your site and quickly leave when they realize that it is a site for legal services and not law schools. In this way, tracking how long visitors view your site can help you determine if your site is optimized for key words that will bring in people who are looking for your specific services.

Which pages of your site get viewed the most tell you which pages people find most relevant. If you discover that people are viewing pages that you thought were insignificant in comparison to other material on your site, you may want to further develop the content on the pages people are viewing the most and have your site optimized for key words related to those things. Also, if people are viewing you informational pages but not your contact information page, you may want to consider putting your contact information and call to action on the pages that get viewed the most.

The click path of your visitors tells you how well your site is functioning and how easy it is for visitors to navigate. Here you can track the order in which people view the pages on your site. This can help you develop a site that better meets the needs of your visitors since you can determine the hierarchy of page importance as determined by your visitors.

Finally, it is important to know the last page visitors see before they leave your site. If visitors are leaving your site before they learn what it is you can offer them and how they can contact you, your site is not very effective. Perhaps visitors are landing on a page that links to outside Web sites, taking your visitors away before they get a chance to realize that you offer the services they are looking for. Or maybe you have a page with dead links or is not very appealing to visitors. It is important to determine why visitors are leaving your site. If they are leaving after they decide to retain your services, that’s great. But if they’re leaving because they’re frustrated or distracted, that’s not so great. The good news is, you can determine what is driving your potential customers away and what is keeping them there when you have a comprehensive analysis of your Web traffic.

SonicSEO.com provides a comprehensive analysis of your traffic statistics as part of your SEO package. Using the same advanced tracking software used by Ford, Wal-Mart and Microsoft, SonicSEO.com is able to arm you with the information you need to track the success of your Web site.

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Analyzing your Web site’s traffic statistics is an essential component of any online marketing campaign. It can tell you what you’re doing well, how traffic is coming to you, help you determine how to generate more targeted traffic to your site and even help you develop a Web site that better meets the needs of your visitors. As a marketing tool, Web sites provide you with a dynamic tool that allows you to track the return on your investment dollar for dollar and easily change your marketing strategy and Web design in response to market shifts.

Please contact us at 888-437-3737 to create a Web site tailored to the needs of your potential customers today!