There are two important.
facets of gettingstarted: first, you need to choose the right tool and you
don’t even have to spend a lot, and second, you need to focus on desired
outcomes and not on what reports you can extract from the tool.
If not initially, then surely after a little while you will notice
your number
one referrer
of traffic will probably be a search engine. If its stock price is anything to go by, it is
probably Google, though it could also be Yahoo! or MSN.
Search engines are very much the kings of the world, and for business large and
small they can have game-changing impact. This might be more true for SMBs because
they have small advertising budgets and have to leverage the power of search engines
to get traffic to their sites.
Site Content Popularity and Home Page Visits
After you know where people come from, the next logical questions are,
What pagesare they visiting? and How well is my home page working?
This makes sense; you have all this great content on your website, and
so it is important to figure out what people are reading, what is working
for you, and what is not. The reason to highlight the home page is different
from what you might imagine. It’s not that it is any more important than
other pages. Read on for the rationale.
Site Content Popularity
Regardless of their size, if websites don’t change daily, most site
visitors usually consume just 20 percent of the site content.
It is extremely important to know which 20 percent.
Site Bounce Rate
The bounce rate report reveals the number of visitors who stayed just a
few seconds or in the case of some tools, only saw one page
on your website.
These are the people who came to your site but didn’t engage, for
whatever reason. Different web analytics tools define bounce rates
differently, but usually it is visitors who stayed on the website for
only five or ten seconds.
Easy-to-find reports
Where visitors come to your website from.
• What search engines and keywords are driving them to your site.
• What content web pages visitors are interested in.
• How valuable your home page is and what you can fix there
• How visitors behave on the top pages of your website, and whether content on
these pages is working especially links.
• Your website’s first impression, and where the most valuable traffic to
your website comes from
Most web analytics, for better or for worse, are focused
on e-commerce websites, and you can’t throw a stone three
feet without hitting conversion rate or another nice e-commerce metric.