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1. Know Your Audience
This is #1 because, in a roundabout way, all the items on this list feed into it. Anyone who has ever made a product or provided a service did so with an idea of who would use it. If you know your audience, you know why they’ll choose your product over someone else’s, and how to keep them coming back.
2. Cater to Them
Analyzing web statistics allows you to make changes to your web presence to improve your users’ experiences and increase leads, sales, or conversions. Does a specific page on your site get a lot of traffic, but others go untouched? Consider creating more content like that one, even if it changes the tone of the site overall.
3. Analyze the value of each visitor
How long are your visitors actually looking at your site? What kind of conversion rate are you getting (people that click vs. people that actually buy)? Knowing whether your large traffic numbers translate to actual dollars is impossible unless you can track conversion rate.
4. Monitor your Page Rank
In a nutshell, your Page Rank is a score that is calculated by how many pages out there on the web are displaying a link to your site. What’s more, a higher rank of the site linking to you means that site counts as a bigger vote. So, get your links out there on bigger sites, and watch your Page Rank climb.
5. Analyze Referral Keywords
Since a lot of folks are going to be driven to your site via search engines, it’s in your best interest to know what words they’re plugging in that return you as a result. This can tell you a lot of things when you combine this info with the statistics about bounce rates and page stay lengths. Maybe a lot of people find your page by accident when typing in a certain word, but they click away within 10 seconds. In a situation like this, you might even consider altering your content so that
6. Know why people are leaving
A good website analytics tool will be able to feed you data about a user’s browsing habits while they’re on your site. You should find a tool that will give you stats on the average user’s number of pageviews on your domain, how long they stayed there, and whether they ever come back or not.
7. Use the data to shore up your weaknesses
This is trickier, because it requires taking the data you get from a tool, and using your own judgment to create insights out of it. For instance, by looking at how long the average stay length for visitors that arrive at your site from a search engine, versus those that arrive there by a referral (like a banner ad), you may determine that one group is finding what they’re looking for, but the other is disappointed and leaves. This allows you to make adjustments.
8. Find a Tool That Does the Work For You
There are a lot of analytic tools out there, but most use proprietary algorithms that come up with metrics they created. Looking at individual sites like Alexa, SimilarWeb, and Compete gives you a full insight into your site’s performance, but takes forever. Tools like HeatSync consolidate all the data into one place, so that you only have to tell it what site you want to retrieve all that data for, and it does the job for you. With less time spent gathering data, you have more time to analyze it. Best of all, HeatSync is currently free, and all cloud-based – so no download necessary.
Best,
Michael Pignataro
VP of Operations
