Do you have any idea where your web site visitors are coming from? Do prospects hang around on your web site for a while? What keywords did they use to get there, and further, what search engine or web site referred them to your web site?

If you can’t answer any of these questions, it’s time to take a deep look at your web site.  If you don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, you clearly can’t chart a course to get your business to succeed online.

Here are five key things my team of marketers look for in web site stats in order to make educated decisions about what to do next…

1.) Bounce Rate. The bounce rate is simply a percentage of how long many people bounced (or left) your web site in a certain second time frame.  If you start seeing a bounce rate jump up above 40%, it’s time to take a good look at why.  Perhaps the web site wasn’t what site visitors expected, perhaps you are leading them to a store or blog that IS NOT within your domain.   Watching the bounce rate helps us make logical decisions about our web site visitors and their behaviors.

2.) Referring Search Engines. Being in the SEO business, we clearly want to make certain that a good deal of traffic is being generated by search engines to the web site.  In my experience, I love to see about a 50% ratio of web site visitors coming from search engines.  Also, the order of traffic generated by search engines: I like to see Google first (should be strong) and Bing & Yahoo second and third.

3.) Unique Visitors. I cringe when I hear a business owner brag about how many ‘hits’ their web site gets.  A hit is essentially every file, graphic, stylesheet, javascript file, etc., that had to load in order to display that particular page.  So frankly, this number could be huge depending on the particular web site. A Unique visitor is just that, a visitor that came to your web site from either a search engine, referring web site or typed your web site address directly into a browser.  Obviously, the more unique visitors that didn’t bounce of the web site and hung around, the higher the potential to sell them your product or service.

4.) Keywords. This one provides you with a wealth of information on how well your organic or pay per click campaign is doing in the search engines  Take a close look at your keywords, you’ll see some craziness, you’ll see some zaniness, but hopefully, you’ll see what your prospects are typing into to find your web site.  Knowing this can help you improve organic rankings by focusing on them in a blog, a new page, or a product description.  Pay close attention to these, they will fluctuate, but again, they will give a great snap shot of what your visitors are looking for.

5.) Average time on web site.  Another good indicator, but can be misleading.  Most people think that the longer someone spends on your web site the better, that may not be the case, they could be digging and digging for a phone number to call you, they may be looking for a place to complain and can’t seem to find it, they may be intrigued by your content and scraping it to use on their own web site…. If you have a store or shopping cart, you probably don’t want people loitering, get them in, make the transaction simple and clean and thank them very much for their business.

Again, I can’t stress how vital paying attention to web stats can set your business up for success online.  The numbers and data will truly set you free and help you chart a course for success.

Call me today to learn about our web site tracking, social media tracking and competitor tracking can help your business climb to new heights on the web.  In Orlando: 407-830-4550, Nationwide: 866-998-6886.

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