Whether you run a large company or you work from home online, monitoring your website traffic is a must. You not only need to know how many people are visiting your site but how they get there. You need to know where they are from and the things that interest them so you can continue creating content or bringing out products that suit them.
Monitoring your website traffic is relatively simple with Google analytics, as long as you know how to use it. There are many functions within this simple system and tricks to get the most out of here. Here are just some of those.
Check Out the Long Term Statistics
By default, you will see the statistics for the website for the last 30 days. That’s great and is useful but you also want to know the statistics for the long term. Consider:
- 1. The last three months
- 2. The last six months
- 3. The last year
- 4. Since creating your website
These analytics will show you how your website has grown over the time. It will show you patterns throughout the months and can give you a clear idea of when new updates to search algorithms have been made. You will be able to make better decisions based on these long term statistics.
Look Into the Details of Your Visitors More
You need to know more than the amount of visitors your website has had. This doesn’t tell you anything except the amount of times your website has been found. You need to know how useful it is for people and how long they stay on the pages.
This is extremely important if you have a blog or you offer advice. It tells you whether your content is helpful and engaging. If not, then you need to make a lot of changes because you will be penalised by the search engines. You need to know the bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who go back to the original page or to another website after reaching your page.
Understanding the Location of Your Audience
Google Analytics is great for giving you the location of your audience. Why do you need to know this? Well, you will know the countries people search from, which will help you create content for them. You may be based in the United States but you may find that your content is read by more people in Europe. This will mean changing your angles slightly to suit those readers—or at least creating something specific for them.
This can also tell you if you are getting traffic directly from another website. You may find that another website is linking back to your website a lot. Use this to your advantage to increase your ranking and the visitors that come to your pages.
Viewing the Browser Information
Another type of information that is useful is the browsers that your visitors use. While it may seem pointless right now, you will be able to tell if more people visit you from a desktop/laptop or from a mobile device. This will tell you whether you need to make your website more dynamic to suit your growing audience. After all, you want to make it as easy as possible for them. It will also tell you if there is a potential bug or problem, such as if you find people using one particular browser click away more often than other browsers.
Monitoring your website traffic is just as important as monitoring your network usage. It tells you how well your business is doing and whether you need to make changes to make it more successful.
Author bio:
This guest post was written by Alice Aires, a tech and networking expert. She helps many businesses improve their websites and understand their analytics to make the best decisions on software for their company needs.
