The other day a frazzled colleague walked into our office looking for me. He’s been his organization’s website administrator for a few months and needed to get a baseline of information around his organization’s website. He’s been using Google Analytics, but complained that there was just too much information to make any decisions.
After going over a few statistics I always look at, I decided to jot them down to share in a blog post. Is this a definitive list? I’d say no; however, this list is an excellent starting point to knowing what’s important to look at in your website statistics or analytics package as well as giving you a basic approach to making your website a better tool for your organization.
So, over the course of a few posts, I’ll go over the following points:
- Total Visitors
- Referrals
- How do visitors use your website?
- Are your objectives being met?
- How do you make it better?
1) Total Visitors
It almost seems too simple, but knowing how many unique visitors you have is the first metric you want to know. Whatever your statistics package, finding the number of total visitors for each month is usually pretty straightforward.
What does it tell you? Well, not much if you only have a month of statisical information. If you have months or years of information, then you’ll be able to chart the month to month totals to arrive at a pretty graph. This graph is handy to compare against your present month’s visitors or comparing against last year’s chart.
Questions you can ask yourself with this information:
- Does this month’s number correspond to how you usually do this time of year? Can I see seasonal variations?
- Are there any spikes or troughs? If so, what happened at that time to explain the change?
- Are visitor numbers increasing or decreasing overall?
The key point I want get across is that it’s important to understand your website on a macro level, the ebb and flow of visitors across days, months, seasons, and years. If you look that the data long enough, you’ll begin to see your traffic’s patterns.
