When I tell a new prospect that we will be installing web site analytic software on their web site they are completely mystified and amazed.  Turns out that most web design companies don’t bother to install the FREE Google Analytics tracking software or give clients access to web hosting stats, etc.  As a marketer, I can’t fathom NOT being able to track and monitor where all of my web site traffic is coming from, how long they are sticking around, what pages they visit more than the others, what the bounce rate is, and most importantly, what keywords folks are using to find my content on the web.

Our team of Internet marketers LIVES by analytics.  We find so many opportunities for our SEO clients by merely paying attention to what’s happening on their web site.  Google Analytics provides us with each keyword that was used to find the web site, so it may be a keyword or keyphrase that we or the client never thought of.  If we do find a keyword / keyphrase that we weren’t really focusing on and notice that it is pulling a nice amount of traffic, we will spend some time trying to elevate that keyword in the search engines.  We may write a blog article around the keyword or spend some more time on Social media around that keyword.  We will also jump into the web site itself and try and find opportunities to optimize for that particular keyphrase.

If you aren’t paying attention to your web site stats, you may be missing out on several opportunities to improve not only your web site, but your Internet marketing efforts as well.  By spending five minutes a week in your analytics, you can discover new keywords, discover new consumer behaviors, discover new linking opportunities, etc.. The Bottom Line: Analytics = Gold.

Being technical geeks and analytical geeks, we digest a great deal of information on any given day from our client’s Google Analytics reports.  These reports give us a great deal of valuable information that we in turn use to help improve not only search engine rankings, but web site usability.

One of the many variables measured in Google Analytics is the web site visitor’s average time on the web site.  We pay attention to this because if people are only sticking around for 2 seconds there are clearly some issues with either the web site itself, or the marketing that drove that web site visitor to the web site in the first place.  For example, if a searcher types in Orlando Widget and lands on a web site that sells Mortgages, it does not compute to the visitor: they leave and continue their search.  On the other hand, if the visitor had typed in Orlando Mortgage and lands on your Orlando Mortgage web site AND your web site is UGLY and does not instill confidence, the average time on site will clearly suffer as your web site visitor has run for the hills.

We typically see an average of about a 2 minute web site visit: if we start seeing a 15 minute web site visit, we start raising our eye brows… Sometimes you have hackers that are looking for vulnerabilities, etc that will stick around on a web site.  The bottom line here: analyzing your analytics can give you a great snapshot as to whats happening or more importantly, Whats NOT happening on your web site.

So many folks think that a hit is an actual ‘visit’ or unique visitor to their web site: they get all excited when they see that they have had 20,000 hits in month.  Here’s the reality: a hit is nothing more than a file that is downloaded or a file that is ‘hit’ when a unique visitor visits your web site.  Your web site may have 20 images that load, a few include files, a stylesheet, etc.  Each file that has to be opened in order to make your web site complete counts as a hit.

With that being said, a much more useful measurement is the unique visitor statistic.  This tells you how many unique individuals have visited your web site in a given time period.

Measuring the success of any Internet marketing or search engine marketing campaign is crucial to the success of that particular campaign.  Like everything, you need a starting point from which to gauge results and a great deal of data to make educated decisions as to the next course of action to take on the web site.

Many people come to us and are perplexed about the language of web stats / analytics: We’d thought it would be helpful to post a few definitions to help you digest your analytics with a bit more authority:

We’ll focus on a unique visitor today:

A Unique Visitor is just as it sounds…. They (a web site visitor) have either visited your web site during the course of a day, week, or month. If they left your site and came back the same day, they are NOT unique.

The unique visitor is typically determined by IP address. The unique visitor count is a great tool to get an overall health rating of your web site’s traffic and gives you a much more accurate gauge of how many folks actually visited your website during a day, week,  or month. 

It is important to note, a unique visitor is DIFFERENT then a hit… We’ll define that term for you next.