Site Analysis: Track the Performance Data That Matters

It’s unbelievable to know 20% of small businesses fail within the first year. That’s a large amount when you think about it.

They fail because they don’t utilize tools that give them important information. What needs to be done is a site analysis.

Conducting your own is vital if you want your business to survive.

Potential customers can find almost any business online nowadays. But when you don’t know how to track the data, you won’t know what’s attracting them and what’s not.

It’s time to go over what data you should focus on. Ready to find out?

Let’s get into it!

Bounce Rate

You want customers to stay on your website, right? When your bounce rate is high, take notice.

This indicates that customers are visiting but leave without performing an action. High bounce rates are caused by a lack of content.

When there isn’t a lot for a visitor to click on, they’ll become bored and leave. You want them to stay by providing content that grabs their attention.

This can be done by having a great sale or peaking their interest with a blog post. Now’s the time to get creative and figure out ways to extend a visitor’s time.

Abandonment Rates

Like bounce rates, abandonment rates count when a visitor left without buying anything. They had a product in their cart but didn’t go through with the sale.

This can be the result of a complicated checkout process or one that has too many instructions. Abandonment rates can be improved upon by making sure the customer experience is quick, easy and efficient.

Traffic

You need to know how your visitors are accessing your site. As part of a site analysis, there are three sources where traffic can come from. Let’s take a look at each one.

Search

Search traffic is gained when your website is found through a search engine. That means your content was good enough to rank on the first page of a visitor’s search results. Search engine traffic takes priority because it’s an organic way to earn more traffic.

Direct

This means someone typed your URL directly into their browser. There was no search inquiry done.

Referral

Referral traffic accounts for external links. This means someone was lead to your website by another site, social media post or blog article.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors differ from regular or returning ones by their activity. Returning visitors access your site constantly.

That means they might visit a different page every day. Unique visitors, on the other hand, haven’t visited your site within seven days.

They’re first timers but are important because this tells you how many new people are coming to your site. Just like the concerns with bounce rate, you want these visitors to become returning ones.

Internal Sessions

While you may think your (or your employee’s) visits don’t count, they actually do. Your site analysis information won’t know the difference between your visits and a stranger’s.

All that you’ll be able to see is the IP address. If that same IP shows up multiple times across the board, it’s most likely yours.

It’s important to either keep track or have software that’ll automatically excuse your own visits. If not, it can give you a false sense of progress.

You may think you’ve had tons of visitors for the current month but you’ll be disappointed to see that it was all you. And frankly, you need a constant stream of visitors to stay afloat.

Spam Traffic

Did you know that 62% of traffic comes from bots? This includes bots that crawl websites and spambots.

Much like internal sessions, you’ll want to keep track of which traffic is made up of spam. Hackers send out their own software to “crawl” sites to steal content. It also allows them to gain access to sensitive data like email addresses.

Keep you and your visitors safe by preventing hackers from gaining access to data. You’ll see a rise in traffic knowing your site is secure.

Conversions

If you run an e-commerce store, your site analysis should include conversion rates. This is vital for learning where your sales are coming from.

It’ll tell you which page has generated the most leads and where people abandoned the purchasing process. When you know where your money is coming from, you can enhance the customer experience.

If you have a lot of people abandoning their carts, this will give you more insight into why. If your sales funnel isn’t doing its job, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Customers want an easy way to checkout and pay. When your website doesn’t have both, it can make it difficult for a potential customer to make a purchase. Improving your conversion rates means you’ll be making more sales.

Interactions

Having a steady stream of traffic is great but you need people to engage with your content. Visitors want to be where the action is. That may include comments for blog posts or reviews for products.

The more they see other people interacting with your site, the better. Even if they don’t stay for long, you can still track their movements and behavior.

For example: what page did they spend the most time on? From there, determine what can be done to get them to engage with your content.

Campaigns

When you take out an ad, you want to know how it’s doing, right? If not, there’s a lot of information you’re missing out on.

When tracked, you’ll be able to see the referral traffic and if that ad led to conversions. It’s a great way to test multiple ads to see which one attracts the most visitors.

Wrapping Up on Conducting Your Own Site Analysis

Having a striving business starts with knowing your numbers. Without that knowledge, you can end up failing in the long run.

It’s always good to be in the know when it comes to your business. Once you know where your traffic is coming from, you can fine-tune your content to bring in more visitors.