Most website designers, and website owners use web analytics. There are so many free tools out there now that it would be remiss of us not to. London web design is a competitive niche, and we aren’t above testing our designs in the real world to make sure they work as expected before handing them over.

The most well known tool is Google Analytics, which is a webmaster tool available from the Google site. It offers a lot of information about how people use your site, where they concentrate on, and where they ignore. It’s a good way of checking to see if the site encourages the behavior you require or whether things need tweaking a bit.

Let’s have a quick overview of what analytics can tell us, then maybe go into it in a bit more depth. This is such an important subject that it demands at least a little time. If you really want to know how your site works, and why you might not be getting quite as many conversions as you’d like, read on.

The most important thing website analytics can tell you is the bounce rate of the site. This is an extremely important statistic and something every website designer, and owner needs to know. Bounce rate is the count of how many people landed on your website but went no further. This is important because the higher the percentage of bounce, the more work needs to be done on the site.

High bounce rates can be caused by a few things, namely poor navigation, poor design, broken links, errors, poor copy, no calls to action or content that doesn’t grab the attention of the visitor. None of which are issues that are insurmountable, but will definitely need addressing.

Before anyone starts panicking, there is no such thing as a 0% bounce rate. You would expect some people to arrive at your site accidentally, or find that it wasn’t quite what they were looking for, which is fine. Different site types will also have different bounce rates. Blogs and sites that are predominantly served by RSS feeds will have higher bounce rates because visitors will only need to visit a single page.

A corporate site or ecommerce site would expect a lower bounce rate, unless they are using a single page structure. Different site types and structures will present different results. Bear this in mind when checking yours. The lower the bounce rate, the more effective the site, and its copy is. On average, somewhere around 30% is decent enough. Anything over 50% needs some work.

Analytics also tell you where your visitors are from. While this isn’t as important as bounce rate, it is useful for targeting your marketing efforts. For example, if you’re targeting “London web design” as a key phrase and most of your traffic is coming from Russia, you have either been hacked or you need to modify your advertising campaign to target London more. For regional based sites, you want to see most of your visitors coming from around your area, for international sites you want to see visitors from the places you’re targeting.

Bounce rate and location are only two of many pieces of data available through website analytics. Next time we’ll look at conversion rates and target pages.

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Using Website Analytics Cont. Last time we spoke about bounce rate, the amount of people who “bounce off” the site without going into it, and location of visitors. We used the example of London web design, and said the location can tell you how effective marketing campaigns are being by showing you where the visitors are from. Continuing from this, [...]