To keep a leg up on your competitors, you need to know what people are doing on your site.
If you don’t have appropriate tracking in place on your site, now’s the time to get it. Not knowing how visitors are behaving once their visit your site is only going to hurt you. You could be monetizing basic visitor actions that would make you thousands of dollars if you were only paying attention.
Here we’ll discuss a few free, basic analysis programs available for your website, and how you can best utilize the information they can provide.
Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
Google provides some very useful, and very free tools that could help you make the most out of the various elements on your website.
Google Webmaster Tools can be found at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ .
With this powerful tool on your website, you can get an SEO analysis of various page factors, as well as an idea of where you stand in SEO rankings. It’s fairly simple to install on your site, and will give you a lot of insight.
Google Analytics is even more useful, in that it will show you how users are interacting with various parts of your website. http://www.google.com/analytics/ . Using Analytics, you can take a look at how long users stay on a page, what sources are giving you the most clicks, and what pages users are “bouncing” from, or leaving, quickly. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to make changes and improvements to your web page that are consistent with your conversion goals.
Another tool worth looking into is Wassup for Wordpress. http://www.wpwp.org/ . Wassup is advertised as a “real-time” Wordpress plugin, allowing you to take a look at visitor source and the visitor’s path through the website as they browse. Google Analytics and many other analytics tools take a while to process visitor information, and display that to you on your dashboard. Wassup claims to take the time out of that process by giving you real-time visitor info.
I Have the Tools – Now What?
If you have Google Analytics or other tracking services in place, your first step is to wait and gather some data. After a few weeks, you should have an idea of how users are behaving once on your site.
Begin by viewing the different reports available in the interface you’re using, and ask yourself what that tells you about your users. Is there a certain page, or a certain part of your conversion process, where you’re losing the most users? Do you find that people spend more time on some pages than others?
Our next blog entry in this series will talk about specific scenarios where your Analytics information could benefit you, so you’ll know exactly what to look for. Until then, do yourself a favor and put tracking into place that will give you info about what visitors are doing! You may be missing out on much more info than you think. Get started today!
