Many businesses invest considerable time and resources into getting people to their sites, but ignore the equally important task of monitoring their visitor’s actions. By understanding how visitors interact with a site, marketers can gain an understanding of their customer’s preferences and better engage them.
All too often marketers make the mistake of assuming their homepage is the most critical page on their site. In most cases, this could not be furthest from the truth. Instead visitors often land on inner pages of interest to them, which they find through search engines and links on other sites. With analytics, webmasters can determine which pages are the most popular and invest their time and resources where they will make a difference. They can also pinpoint areas that are in need of improvement and adjust their approach. By looking at a page’s bounce rate, which shows how many users leave a page immediately after arriving, they can determine how effective their page and the marketing strategies which led the user to it really are.
In effect, a website can be come a laboratory where different approaches can be tried, to determine which are the most effective. You can try different colors and graphics on different pages of your site and see in almost real time how your visitors respond to them.
Further, by using services like PostRank, an analytic tool tailored for blogs, you can determine not only how engaged your visitors are with your site, but how they arrived there in the first place. You can then determine which forms of advertising where the most effective and which are simply wasting your hard earned money.
So, now that you understand the importance of analytics, you are probably wondering how you can go about capturing all of this statistical information. Fortunately for you, there are a number of free tools which will automate this process for you. Once of the most popular, is Google Analytics, which serves as a free complement to Google’s paid advertising service, AdWords. The service can be setup in a matter of minutes and only requires adding a small portion of code to the pages of your site, both for verification and trending purposes. Once in place, you will be able to see detailed information, such as what region your guests are located in, what pages referred them, and what browsers they are using.
The possibilities of how this information can be used to reshape a site are endless and analytics should be embraced by all serious website owners. If you are not already using analytics, you could be wasting thousands without even realizing it. Adopt analytics today and realize the infinite possibilities.
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Honestly, who isn’t going to click on a post that says “Sick of wasting money?”, we can all agree with that one. Very informative post. It leads the reader in a lot of different directions that can help anyone who reads it.
I like the way you stated that a website can be a laboratory where different approaches can be tried. Let’s not forget that the internet is evolving as the world is constantly evolving. Thus, constantly trying new things in order to expand your reach is a good idea. Humans are able to interact with their global environment more than ever today. Finding ways to do that using web analytics is very useful.
Joey, you raise an excellent point. My original title, “Sick of wasting money?” was ineffective from an SEO perspective.