Web Page Optimization Made Easy Part 1 – Analyzing Analytics
As the internet continues to become more and more popular in the mainstream, new audiences, some with more experience online than others, are interacting with your website in fresh and unpredictable ways which you are able to monitor & study to your benefit. The goal of web page optimization is to get the best performance possible out of every last page that your visitor lands on, and this is easier said than done. Luckily there are analytics tools out there that we can easily place on our websites to track activity that we can then study and learn from.
As part of our effort to provide informative editorials to our readers, we’ve put together a beginners guide to website optimization, over the next couple of articles we’ll be introducing you to website optimization using tools that are completely free, and will allow you to improve the browsing experience on your website.
Ignoring the optimization process and creating a website on intuition alone is always the easiest route, but it is obviously a terrible mistake that the majority of webmasters continue to make, leaving design decisions untested can be costly. An unoptimized website loses potential visitors, valuable page-views, long term clients & most importantly, sales.
Googles Suite of FREE Services
Google offers several public tools that will help you get started with learning about your demographics and traffic sources. We’re going to walk you through several of them, detailing how they work, and how you can use them to your advantage.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the most widely used tracking software on the web today, and with good reason, it’s thorough, reliable and free. Use Google Analytics to track how many visitors your website recieves daily.
We recommend you get started by visiting www.google.com/analytics and setting up your free account now, if you haven’t already, it’s easy and only takes about 5 minutes.
After you’ve completed the setup process, install the Javascript code into <body></body> tags on your website(you may need a web technician to do this for you), it will take a day or 2 until you start seeing measurable statistics in your account.
There are literally hundreds of individual metrics that Google Analytics tracks, it’s encouraged that you spend time clicking through each of the navigation tabs on your own to figure out which metrics are most important to your business. In order to help you become familiar with the software, we’re going to give you a preview of several of the more immediately important metrics using pre-populated data from our own websites traffic.
Referring Sites
Referring Sites let you know what websites are sending visitors to your website via a hyperlink, video or image link. These visits are often from people who found you socially, by either discussion on another website, a mention in a blog post, or through a static link that you may have had placed. Use this tab to track or plan social marketing campaigns.
Keywords
The Keywords page will tell you exactly what keywords are sending traffic to your web page. You can use this data to help determine what keywords you may need to focus on in future content, many times you’ll find that people are finding your website through keywords that you would have never guessed. Visit the Search Engines tab to determine which search engines are sending you the most traffic.
We’ll be going over how to further track your Search Engine Optimization progress in our second entry of the series.
Content Overview
Content Overview allows you to see 3 very important metrics, pageviews, unique pageviews, and more importantly, the pages that are reaching the highest percentile of your visitors. For us, the Our Work page was the most popular page on our website, followed by Services and Company. This falls pretty much in order with our expectations and intentions, but we would have liked to see the “Contact Us” page at least in the top 5, since these results(Month of January) we’ve made changes that should push us in that direction.
Absolute Unique Visitors
This is a metric that confuses a lot of users new to Analytics, Absolute Unique visitors differs from Unique Visitors in that an Absolute Unique is counted only once per the selected Date Range. For our example, we took statistics from the month of January, we had 983 Visitors in January, but only 294 Absolute Unique visitors. That’s a very big, and important difference.
Bounce Rate
A pages bounce rate is often associated with the “quality” of your visitors landing page. If a pages bounce rate is over 55%, then it is highly likely that your page and keywords are not keeping your visitors attention. This means that keywords and graphic placement should be tested and optimized. An acceptable bounce rate benchmark should be seen as around 25%-40%.
Our bounce rate for the month of January evened out to about 43%, we consider that decent, but bounce rate can often be completely subjective from site to site, and it may vary based on marketing methods used. For example a successful e-mail marketing campaign may produce interested visitors who collectively lower your websites bounce rate to 20% for 2 weeks. While a display campaign may spur a buyers curiosity, and half of them may lose interest upon landing, raising your bounce rate to 50%. It’s wise to keep a close eye on your bounce rate during a marketing campaign, to get a direct understanding of your messages effectiveness.
Map Overlay
Possibly my favorite feature in the Analytics suite to look at, the Map overlay shows you exactly what geography your visitors are coming from, particularly useful for optimizing for local businesses. Google is very accurate and intelligent about determining a visitors location via IP address.
That’s it for our first entry, while we know it was light on technical instruction, we hope it was helpful. Look forward to Part 2, where we’ll be covering real time tracking tools, and more advanced optimization techniques.
Not interested in Google Analytics? Try Piwik, it’s free!
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