Want More Traffic? Take the (Fun) First Step

Traffic. Visitors. Readers. Prospects.

Anyone who runs a website wants a lot of all of the above.

But traffic doesn’t happen by itself.

Of all the factors that come in to play to get your site more visitors, knowing your audience is perhaps the most important.

This is where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics – Nutritious and Delicious

Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks the activity on your site. It offers you a huge variety of ways to understand your visitors’ behavior while they’re parked on your particular patch of the Web.

This means you get cold, hard data about what your visitors really want.

Sometimes your readers surprise you. Carol Tice of MakeALivingWriting.com recently wrote a post on Google In-Page Analytics. Once Carol took a look at her Analytics, she discovered that her “About” page was clicked on more than any other tab.

She redesigned her site based on what she learned – and her readers responded with even more visits.

And Google Analytics is fun! As Carol points out, it feels like spying. As you learn about your visitor, you come to understand how they feel about your content.

Think about it: If you wrote a book that was published in print, could you discern this kind of information about your readers?

How to Interpret the Data

To get oriented to Analytics, it helps to understand some of the terms on your dashboard. Here are definitions of the most common words you’ll see:

• Visits identifies how many visits there were to your page. A “visit” is a pageview when that user has viewed no other page on your site in the previous half hour.
• Pageviews describes how many times the various pages on your site were viewed.
• Pages/visit indicates how many pages users view when they come to your site.
• The Bounce Rate tells what percentage of users left your site after viewing only one page.
• New Visits describes what percentage of your users came to your site for the first time.

Once you have a feel for the terms, you can dive in to the reports, which are on the left-hand navigation.

The types of available reports are…

• Visitors – where they’re located, how often they visit, and which kinds of computers and browsers they use
• Traffic Sources – which keywords brought visitors to you and what they clicked on
• Content – which pages are most popular; where people enter and exit
• Goals – “goals” in Analytics-speak are web pages that represent the end result of your site – making a sale or signing up for a newsletter or download; use this report to measure conversions
• Ecommerce – merchandising and revenue reports
• In-Page Analytics (under Content) – a click map that shows what percentage of visitors click on what links

All in all, Google Analytics is not only a vital tool in the success of your site, but also a reward for a site well cared for.

Time to Start…

Take the first step to getting more traffic.

Get to know your audience with Google Analytics. Learn what they enjoy on your site, how long they stay on each page, and what brought them in.

Then use that information to continually improve your online enterprise… and enjoy the increased attention.

Download Google Analytics.