Bouncing Around With Website Metrics
If there’s one thing you learn from this column, it should be this: Remove the word “hits” from your online vocabulary.
Why? Well, every time you use the word hits as it relates to web traffic — as in “My website gets a million hits a month!” — the tech savvy people around you are rolling their eyes. That’s because hits are a fairly inaccurate traffic metric because they measure the number of files you have on a given page. For example, if your homepage has five images on it, one visitor to your site equates to five hits. So, people who go around talking up their hits run the risk of appearing to peddle inflated numbers, or worse, of being just plain ignorant.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about what traffic measures you should really focus on. As anyone who’s spent some time looking at a Google Analytics report can attest, there’s a plethora granular data available to distract you. So I set out to talk to local experts and get their take on what the top traffic metrics are.
Numbers Game
The top of the list for any business owner should be a baseline understanding of unique visitors, according to Matt Ward, owner of Central Mass. Web Design in Gardner.
The number of unique visitors tells you how many individual IP addresses visited your site in a given time period, so it’s the best real picture of how many customers are coming to check out what your business has to offer.
But how do you know how many unique visitors is right for your site? The unfortunate truth is that hard and fast rules on traffic are nearly impossible to find. The right number of monthly visitors could be 200 or 200,000, depending on the industry, whether you are business-to-business, or whether you have an e-commerce site. The important thing to remember is that a sheer volume of visitors doesn’t do you any good if they aren't converting into paying customers.
To that end, Ward recommends keeping a close eye on your site’s bounce rate. That statistic tells you what percentage of visitors stick around. The higher the bounce rate, in theory, the weaker your site. A low bounce rate (40 percent or less) means that a majority of the people who arrive at your site click around, read some stuff, and hopefully spend some money.
But Ward cautions about getting too bogged down in incremental daily or monthly changes in traffic metrics.
“What you want to see is trends going in a positive direction over time,” he said.
Along the trend line, Paul Wackell of Imagine Web Designs in Worcester, recommends paying close attention to how your traffic reacts to various marketing efforts. For example, if you complete a big print or online ad campaign that plays up your website, did your traffic increase as a result? If not, you might want to reconsider how you are spending those marketing dollars.
Another key metric that Wackell keeps an eye on for his clients is referral traffic. He likes to track how people are finding the website. If people aren’t finding you through a Google or Yahoo search, then that could point a serious problem with how your website is designed. And he also watches what content draws people in and increases their time on site.
Name Game
For Nathan Harris, president of New Perspective Web Solutions of Worcester, the key metric to watch is the performance of your keywords. Traffic tracking software like Google Analytics can tell you what words people type into search engines to find your site. If the most popular keywords are simply the name of your company and a few misspellings, then you might have some search engine optimization work to do, according to Harris.
“You need to consider what your target market should be putting in (to a search engine),” Harris said.
Of course, that’s easier said then done. As Harris puts it, picking keywords “is as much of an art as it is a science.”
If all this talk of unique visitors, bounce rates and keywords has your eyes crossing, don’t worry, you’re not alone. We’re in the midst of a technical revolution, and it’s impossible to keep up with the latest jargon. But making an effort to wrap your mind around our new online reality can only help. If you’ve never looked at an analytics report for your website, you probably should. Ideally, have someone with a grasp of the technical stuff walk you through it.
If you ignore your website metrics entirely, you’re losing out on the big advantage, according to Wackell.
“The one great thing about the web is that if you track your stats, you know about everything that’s going on,” Wackell said. “You don’t know how many people are looking at your yellow page ad.”
Got news for our Digital Diva column? E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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