There are so many ways you can monitor your site. Google Analytics, Quantcast, Woopra, and much more. But with all these bars, graphs, and numbers – what do they mean? This article will discuss how you can analyze your site stats.
The Terms
Visits – This is pretty much self-explanatory.
Average Time on Site – This is how long your visitors stay on your site. You want them to stay on your site as long as possible. This means you have to provide interesting, relatable, and valuable content.
Bounce Rate -Google explains bounce rate as:
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.
Conversion Rate – This is the percentage of how many people you have gotten to do something other than just visit and leave your main page. It might be an e-commerce shop, a script, an e-book, or something. This is something that attracts people to the nifty parts of your site that you wanted people to see.
How To Make These Work For You
Applying these tools usually takes inserting a snippet of code somewhere in your theme. The site will track and you can go in daily or weekly to see your site’s progress.
In order to see progress, you have to create content that will attract readers – no matter what niche you might be in. And yes, even if you just have a journal site to document your family life, as long as you are striving to reach a certain audience, you too also have to watch your stats.
Focus on what people are looking for on your site, what pages they are visiting, where they entered from, where they left your site from, and even what time they are visiting. You can blog anytime you want, but if your regular visitors come around a certain time, aim to publish before they might come by.
You might have to venture into search engine optimization and make sure your articles are effectively being seen. So, if your keywords are not what they should be… you might want to go back and check things out.
If you have a site that has several major products (whether it be a free product or one for purchase), you can focus on each. When you do, check your stats to see what methods are successful and what are not. If people are visiting the page, but nothing is happening, you might want to check out the content on the page and see why it is not bringing the results you want.
A few outside related resources in Web Analytics that you might like to read when you are done here:
Web Analytics 101 -Learn Which Data You Should Be Using
Annotations of Google Analytics..How To Successfully Track What’s Working
What other suggestions do you have for anyone looking to make the most of their site stats? Any questions?
Although the results are not as in-depth… I also like Alexa.
I like to check weekly on mine. Of course, my site is going on 4 years in May.
Quantcast seems to have nice stats, though I do prefer Google any day over it. The ranking and algorithms are a bit different.
Google Analytics is very robust for a free program. Although it's important to see what's going on with your blog by checking your stats, you shouldn't obsess over it. I know, It's a little addicting. Lol
Those top 3 are wonderful sites to check your stats, unfornutalely for Quantcast, I site doesn't show up. I guess it's still too new for them.
My recent post How To Avoid Writer’s Block And Effectively Write For Your Readers In Mind
Jeez, I'm like a statistic fan boy, I hit that reload page 5 times a minute.
You're insights are pretty awesome, I just look at my page views and leave at that. I'm gonna change that from now on, but with WordPress Statistics. Is Google Analytics really that good ?
rofl… WordPress Statistics are fine, but I have found Google Analytics to be better. This is the same product that will allow you to be able to see your site exactly how the search engine sees it.
Stats really help to realize where the blog stands and to make decisions for future changes or deciding the direction where it would be beneficial.
I check my Analytics stats once a day and keep observing the trends. But what I have found is the blogs generally have higher bounce rate compared to the sites. I have a site where bounce rate is around 35% and a blog has the double of it. How is your experience?
My recent post Which keyword research tool to use? SEO Blogger?
My bounce is about 42%. I have been working on this recently and will be applying changes to my websites to direct people to the vital parts of my site like the free graphics, and my free PHP scripts. I will also be having a couple ebooks out as well.
These kinds of things should help boost more interest into sections of my site that I want people to see.
I also forgot to mention… it is really a toss up on whether regular sites versus blogs have more or less of a bounce rate. It really depends on how successful you are at getting people to come to your site, stay on it, and surf through it, rather than just visit the front page and then leave.
What about site goals? What does mean?
Hi Stacey! Site goals – what you want to do with your site.
Hi Nile,
It seems to me that these are the basic/fundamental terms that every website owner would like to keep in mind. This is because they can judge their website movement among people as well as on internet. Thanks.
Hello Nile
Google analytics is the awesome tool for analyzing sites states.It provide all the stats easily and at one place.I like this tool.Informative post. Thanks for it.