Purchasing and pre-purchasing decisions happen online these days.  Businesses that want to compete, let alone stand out, need to be actively pursuing an online marketing strategy. More so, organizations need to have control of their website to make frequent content updates and analytics installed to measure those efforts.  And while technology, like running a website and analyzing traffic data, may seem daunting to some, it’s really pretty accessible these days.  Tools like Google Analytics have revolutionized monitoring what is happening on your website.

Website Analytics Snapshot

If you’re into data, then Google Analytics gives you more than enough data to sift through, but if you’re not so much into numbers and just want to see the basics of what is happening on your site then it’s accessible to you too.  Here are some key metrics to review:

1. Users – this is the number of unduplicated visitors to your site over the time frame you specified (we recommend looking at a monthly view and comparing to that the prior month, but also to the same month last year when you have that much data).
2. Bounce Rate – this is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left the site from their entrance page).  This can help you understand what pages have the highest bounce rate and give you insight on how to improve that page so that people stay and visit more pages on your site.
3. Demographics Information – under this area, we like to look at the city metric as most of our business and prospects are in Pittsburgh, PA.  For a local business this metric can be interesting to review.
4. Visitor Frequency – if you have a blog on your website, then your expectation may be that there is a high percentage of return visitors. So you should set a goal and measure that particular statistic against your expectation.
5. Mobile Traffic – maybe you don’t have a responsive website and see via the analytics that a large portion of your traffic is entering your site on a mobile device.  This may convince you to make your site more responsive.
6. Traffic Sources – The above five stats can all be found under the category “audience.”  Under traffic sources you can find data on which keywords are being used by visitors in the search engines, which search engines refer the most traffic and which websites refer you traffic.  It’s a very helpful section for identifying what is working with your social media marketing and search engine efforts.
7. Social – this is a relatively new area in Google Analytics.  Here you can see which social media networks are sending you the most traffic, the metrics on a particular URL which was shared via social and any conversions that resulted.  If you are taking the time to produce unique content on your site and then leveraging those URLs in social media, this area is a key statistic on the effectiveness of your content.  You can create more than one version of your URL for posting in various social channels, thus tracking which channel is most effective for that piece of content.
8. Content – in this area you can review the pages of your site that receive the most traffic. This can be especially helpful in evaluating the success of a new page or a content campaign.

These are just some of the basic metrics, but with a tool like Google Analytics there are many more layers . The bottom line is that by tracking some of these data points, an organization can measure their activities in social media and other  marketing efforts. After all, results are the end game.