You have a website. Maybe it was built seven years ago by a web designer that was a friend of a friend. Maybe it was built by your cousin. Maybe you built it. You’ve been wondering if it is bringing you any traffic, because it’s just not obvious. You wonder if anyone even ever looks at your website. You haven’t really done any major updating to it, in fact, it may be growing dusty and full of cobwebs. How do you know if it’s time to refresh your website? There are a couple of really great tools out there that can put traffic information about your site right in your lap, and the best part is that you don’t even have to pay a dime to get a pretty decent snapshot of what’s happening (or not happening) on your website.
Today we’ll talk about Google Analytics. This is a great tool that should be used by anyone who cares about their web traffic. If you already are using Google Analytics, you know that you have a plethora of useful information at your fingertips. You can see how many visitors are landing on your page each month, week, day, hour. You can tell if they are new or returning visitors. You can see how long they spend on your website and what your bounce rate is. You can see where your visitors are from, country and/or city. You can even see the demographics of your visitors, age, male or female, what their interests are. All of this is extremely vital information.
One one hand, you can tailor your content on your website to the people who are landing on your page. Information that an 18 year old male is interested in is not the same information that a 40 year old female is interested in. Delivering relevant content that interests your users keeps them on your page longer and if they are engaged, they are more likely to walk through your doors.
On the other hand, if your target client is a 45 year old professional woman and your analytics are showing that most of your visitors are 18 year old males that are interested in sports, perhaps it’s time to look at the content on your site and see if it needs to be refreshed with information that is more relevant to your ideal client.
Google Analytics can keep you busy for a long time, analyzing your website data, but in order to make use of it, it needs to be installed into the code of your website. At Starfire, every website that we build has Google Analytics built into it. We’re always happy to give you a run down of what to look for in analyzing the data and of course we’ll offer suggestions of changes that can be made to more accurately reflect who your company is so that your ideal clients are the ones finding your online presence.