In today’s digital landscape, your website is your most valuable asset. It oftentimes is the first impression that people have with your company. But is your website working for you or against you?
One way to find out is to regularly check your analytics, including the number of visitors you are getting and what people are doing on your site once they are there.
First Step: Do you have Google Analytics? This is a free tool that you can ask your webmaster to add to the back end of your site. There is no cost for this service. Contact your website developer today.
Second Step: Log-in regularly (once a week) and take note of the following:
- How are people arriving on your site? Are they finding you through search, referral from social media or another website, or are they directly accessing your site via your URL address (in other words, by typing in your web address)? Knowing how people are getting to your site is important because then you can make important marketing decisions on how to drive more traffic to your site.
- How are people accessing your site? Are they visiting your website from their mobile devices, tablets or computers? Be sure to look at what your site looks like from a cell phone, tablet and computer monitor. Make sure that your site is easily navigable by any of these methods.
- How long are people staying on your site? What is the average time that they are spending? If it is a long time, then you know you are captivating their attention. If they are staying a relatively short time, then you can take steps to add content that is more appealing and will keep them on pages longer. The average session duration, according to industry standards, is 2 to 3 minutes. However, be careful not to rely on this average too much. Think through the content on your site and make changes if there is something relevant that could be added to keep people engaged longer.
- What are your most popular pages? What are people doing when they are on your website? What pages are getting the most visits? What interests them most? Is there more content or more important information that you can provide on those pages?
Answering these questions will provide you valuable information about what people are interested in and how your website is performing. Overall, your goal is to
improve the experience that customers have with your company online.
Stay tuned. Next month, we will be covering Google Analytics goal setting to ensure you are making an impact.
