BOOK MONDAY: Who visited your website and when?

Ready for another one? Just so that the new readers stay on top of things. Every week I will be publishing an excerpt from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

Last week I disclosed parts of the chapter “Diversifying operational risk of domestic market behavior” and this week we will dig into web analytics and why it’s important to know who visited your website and when.

So here we go:

The problem with intelligence is that hardly anyone knows its true value. This also applies for the intelligence you can collect from your website.

The same is true for website traffic analysis. Only, that it is even more important to know who visited your website, what pages they viewed for what period of time, where they exited your website, and where they came from in the first place.

Let’s start with the information you can ascertain from website analysis:

1.   where your website visitor came from can be good to know if you want to determine whether a link building campaign was successful or which ones you can easily neglect

2.   what geographic region did your website visitor come from is valuable if you have launched a regionally limited marketing campaign and want to figure out how successful it was

3.   How long did they view which pages might be helpful to know because it can show you what pages of your website have to be revised: imagine you have a page which takes you about 4 minutes to read and your visitors only stay 30 seconds on average. That’s an indicator that you have a damn intelligent readership or the content sucks.

4.   Which pages were visited most is definitely a good indicator to figure out what you should be writing about in the future. The reason for highly frequented pages can either be that they are spread all over the web and the visitors come in by link or that this page just hit the spot and people are coming in using search engines.

5.   What browsers and operating systems they use is important to know to determine whether your readership can view your content correctly. If 70% of your readers use mobile browsers and your website is only made for regular ones you’ll know why they jump off immediately.

These were just five of the many reasons I love analytics. But there are a lot of things you can really suck out of the reports you get from a good analysis tool.

Speaking of good analysis tools for website traffic… they do not have to be expensive products which you buy from a company which specializes in this field.

Google offers a free, very powerful, and easy to implement tool called “Analytics” which will do the job for a majority of companies out there.

It captures all of the features I pointed out above and way more. Hey, Google holds that information anyhow so why not make it accessible to users out there to help them improve their website and get rid of flaws they may have.

If you want to learn more about this topic, my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) is available for purchase and – as always – if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any time.