Who is visiting my site and what are they doing? The importance of website analytics.

Have you ever wondered who is coming to your website and what they are doing on it? Website analytics are a great thing. I have experienced the glories of analytics both from a corporate perspective and an individual perspective and am here to offer some advice and insights about them.

From a personal or blog site perspective, they’re great. There are many free options including Google Analytics and ones through Jetpack that are built right into WordPress. You can see the city/state visitors are coming from, how much time they spent on the site, what pages they visited, if they left comments, and IP addresses and ISPs and even if they have visited the site before from the same IP address. It’s awesome to see if folks are liking your content and returning. It also shows bounce rates and from which pages they occur. You can see if the user navigated directly to your site, or found it via a search engine and even what key words led them to the site. If they found your site though an external link, it shows what link it was and it shows the links they clicked on your site.

This is great to see if there are certain links people like and you can include or promote more links like that. Also, if a social media site is driving more traffic than another (say Twitter vs. LinkedIn) you can promote more on the driver. Most analytics sites also show you major events on each days; for example if you posted a new blog or changed something else on the site. These can be attributed to upticks in traffic. Finally, you can compare all the data from a specified time period to see other trends like if traffic has increased in a certain month or year and compare the potentially contributing variables. This all contributes to making a better user experience.

Businesses use these analytics all the time to determine what is working on their sites and what is not. Where are people clicking? What is driving conversion? Where are people dropping off? So much can be learned from looking at these trends and it is really a waste if you do not take the time to set one of these programs up. I know it’s helped me to understand where the traffic on my site is coming from and also identify where I can improve my posts. It’s amazing what technology can do, huh? Let’s see how this post drives traffic 🙂