If you felt a bit overwhelmed the first time you logged in to a tool like Google Analytics or Clicky – you’re not alone. While website analytics tools are the best way to track visitors to understand how they find and engage with your blog, they can be a little challenging to understand. In today’s post we’ll take a quick look at how you can make sense of your analytics and use the information within to accomplish your goals.
Where Are Your Visitors Coming From?
The “referrer” is one of the most critical pieces of information you can have about each of your visitors as it tells you where they found your blog post. For example, you may find that for a given blog post you receive a high percentage of visitor traffic from search engines like Google and Bing, or perhaps from social sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Knowing where your visitors are coming from allows you to focus your promotional efforts in these areas.
What Are They Doing on Your Website?
Now that you know how each visitor has arrived at your website, you’ll want to figure out what it is they’re doing. Your “bounce rate” is a figure that tells you what percentage of your users clicked the “back” button or otherwise left your blog after viewing a single post, and is a figure that you’ll want to keep your eye on. You’ll also want to analyze the “time on site” data to see if your content is engaging users or if they’re simply scanning and leaving. Finally you’ll want to understand common “paths” that visitors follow on your blog. For instance, you may find that a common path after landing on a particular blog post is to click a link to another post and then a call-to-action button.
Where Are They Going when They Leave?
Lastly, you’ll want to check on which pages your blog’s visitors are exiting your website from. If you’re tracking the outbound links on your website you will also be able to see which links are being clicked and where visitors are going when they leave. Knowing this data will allow you to stem any “leaky” areas which are causing you to lose visitors.
As you can see, there are a handful of data points that you’ll want to check regularly to gain a keen understanding of how your visitors are finding your blog, what they’re doing and where they’re going when they leave. Once you know these points you can begin to optimize them to ensure that you’re converting visitors into newsletter subscribers or earning a sale.
If you need help understanding these metrics or want to have a website that will do a better job with content marketing and promoting your business, we would be happy to talk with you and see if MySMARTblog would be a good fit for your needs. Fill out this form and one of our team members will follow up to see how we can help you and your business.
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