Website analytics is the process of measuring how your website is ranking on search engines and what traffic it is experiencing. Free programmes like Google Analytics are essential for providing real, measurable statistics on how well your website is performing, what people are typing in to find you, and (most importantly) how you can improve your website where it is not performing optimally.
Breaking down website analytics:
From queries to bounce rates and click-through rates, your analytics programme will be able to break down exactly how effectively your website’s SEO is working – but to do that, you need to know exactly what these terms mean and how important they are.
- Visits – new and returning. When someone lands on your website, your analytics programme will count and track it until the person leaves the site or the session expires. New visitors and returning visitors will be tracked through cookies for additional statistical information.
- Pageviews. This is simply the amount of times that a page on your website is viewed. Because people often visit the same page multiple times in a single session, through accident or because they forgot certain information, the programme will also track unique pageviews for further accuracy.
- Bounce rates. This is the rate at which users visit your site but only look at one page before leaving. This occurs for numerous reasons, but ideally you want this rate as low as possible, as the longer people stay on your website and the more pages they browse, the better.
- Click-through rates. This is the rate at which users saw a link to your page, whether in a blog, article or on a social media site and chose to visit your website. Click-through rates are very important, as they reflect the effectiveness of your SEO strategy especially in regards to content marketing, so you want them to be as high as possible.
If you’d like more information on website analytics and how it can help drive traffic to your website, contact WSI today.