Making Your Own Website

Tracking your web sites visitors

There is no point having a website if you do not know how often it is viewed.  How can you gauge if it is working for you?

I have had lots of clients saying their website was a waste of time and money. Once you have installed the free service called Google Analytics on it, you can see the complete picture. Don’t forget people might look at your website then phone you up, but they rarely say ‘I just saw your website’. It could be that Google Analytics will say no one visits your site, and then you know that there is a problem and that you need to sort out your SEO.

Important features from Google Analytics

 

 

Working from the top of the picture the most commonly used features are:

Graph

This shows you in a visual format how many visitors you have had every day over a set period of time, usually one month.

Visits

Total number of visits for the set duration.

New Visits

When a computer visits your website Google Analytics will place a tracking cookie onto it, a cookie is a small text file that contains a tracking serial number.  If Google Analytics sees one of it’s cookies on the visiting computer it knows that, that computer has been to your site before.  New Visits shows what percentage of the total visit count are New and Unique visitors and thus indicates the percentage of repeat visits.

Bounce Rate

This is the percentage of people that only view one page on your site and go no further. A high bounce rate is bad, it indicates that your site is not inviting, interesting, appealing to people or you are attracting the wrong market. This normally means you have to rewrite the page.

Average Time on Site

As it says, this shows you how long on average a visitor stays on your site.  A few minutes is normal for most websites, but it depends on how many pages or how much text you have.  Think about yourself, how long do you stay on a website when browsing for information?  If the average is in seconds then you might have a problem.

Traffic Source

How your visitors found you, did they use a search engine, a link from another site or did they type your domain name directly.  It will even tell you what keywords they typed into a search engine.

Map of Visitor Location

Location of people viewing your site – it’s no good if your site gets loads of visitors from China and you’re a local plumber in Wrexham.