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Using tools like Google Analytics it's possible to understand how effective your website is. Website stastic tools provide a wealth of information, so much so that sometimes you can feel lost in the details.
If you just want a very quick overview of how effective your website is, what are the key statistics to look at?
The following statistics are what we consider to be the most important stats to quickly check, month to month, to see how a website is performing:
- Unique visitors - The number of individual visitors that have visited the website.
- Visits - The number of visits made by all visitors (if a visitor re-visits the website they are counted again).
- Average number of pages per visit - The average number of pages each visitor looked at (page views).
- Average time on site - The average time in minutes that the visitor was on the website.
- Source - A breakdown of where the visitors come from. The source should be shown as a percentage, and made up of: search engines, referring sites and direct traffic.
- Specific goal conversion (e.g. number of sales or downloads) - Each website will have a particular objective such as generating sales or providing marketing materials as downloads. These objectives can be measured by calculating what percentage of visitors 'converted' and so fulfilled the goal. For example: 5% of visitors purchased a product or 89% of visitors downloaded a marketing pdf file. (To track downloads to pdf files in Google Analytics, see this post)
Website statistics for managers and business owners
It can be tempting to burden business owners or managers with all the statistics that you have access to. The problem with doing this is that they will often get lost in the details and struggle to see a general pattern. These 6 key statistics are ideal for presenting to managers or business owners, so that they can understand how their effective their website is.
Although it depends on the importance of the website to a business, we would suggest that a more detailed report should be presented to the business owner or manager twice a year, and the six stats above provided monthly. The more detailed report would include statistics like top pages viewed, top downloads, top products purchased, top referring sites, top keywords and top visitor locations.
Do you think that these 6 statistics are effective in giving a quick idea of website performance?
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May 01, 2008
Votes: +0