Nearly 50% of businesses are using analytics to make business decisions. Yet, many of these businesses are challenged to use data wisely.
There’s almost too much data to sift through to make smart choices. A lot of business owners and marketing managers look at data sets and are unsure what they all mean.
If you’re looking to increase website traffic to your site, you need to know how to collect and use data. Read on to find out how to use site analytics to get more website traffic.
Install the Right Analytics Tools
Do you use website analytics tools on your website? There are two standard tools you have to have on your site.
The first is Google Analytics. This tool tells you everything about the traffic on your website. You know what devices they use, how they arrive at your site, and how long they stay on your site.
Search Console is a tool that helps you understand how your site appears in Google search results. You can see which keywords your site ranks for, and which keywords are driving traffic to your site.
Both of these tools are free to use and they give you a lot of insights about your website traffic.
Know the Basic Analytics Terms
Before you get into how much site traffic your site gets, you need to understand how to interpret your site analytics. Here are a few basic terms that you need to know.
Visit: This is a site session where someone visits your website.
Unique Visitors: People will visit your site more than once. This metric accounts for that and tells you how many people visit your site.
Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visits that end after only using one page on your site. The lower the bounce rate, the more pages people visit. It’s a sign that you’re driving the right kind of traffic to your site. A high bounce rate usually indicates that you site experience is lacking something.
Exit Page: This is the last page that people visit before leaving your site. You could find that the same pages appear as exit pages. It’s usually a sign of a usability issue. Check to see how those pages appear across devices and make sure the content is readable.
Average Time on Site: This is the average amount of time spent on your site. If you find that people don’t spend a lot of time on your site, then you’ll want to look deeper as to why.
Traffic Sources: This is a very important metric to use to increase website traffic. This tells you the source of your website traffic, whether it’s from social media, search engines, or other sites.
As you can tell, these basic metrics can give you a lot of information. Consider these metrics a starting point for collecting and interpreting data.
Take Baseline Measurements
You’ll then need to take baseline measurements. This is the starting point that tells you if your site traffic is increasing or not.
It’s important to track your metrics, but you don’t want to fall into the trap of obsessively analyzing data. Make it a point to check traffic once every few weeks. This will give you enough information to make decisions.
How to Use Analytics to Boost Traffic
Once you have your initial measurements, it’s time to create a strategy to boost traffic. You can look at the source of your traffic and leverage that information to get even more traffic.
Let’s say that your site gets a lot of traffic from search engines. After a little digging, you find that one article gets the bulk of your traffic. There are related keywords that can drive even more traffic to your site.
You decide to pivot that page’s content to rank for the higher-volume keyword.
Another way to improve your site traffic is to lower load times. If you find that you have a high bounce rate, this could be a reason why.
Go Beyond Boosting Traffic
Boosting website traffic is great if you have advertising on your site. If you want to make a living from having ads on your site, you need a ton of traffic.
If you sell products or services, a ton of traffic won’t do a lot of good if it doesn’t convert. Not only do you want to get a lot of traffic, but you want those people to sign up to your email list or book an appointment.
You then have a little more control in your interactions with visitors, making a sale much more likely.
Understand the Why Behind the What
Site analytics tools like Google Analytics tell you part of the user experience. You know visitors find your site, but you don’t really see why they leave a page or visit another one.
Without that information, you may be missing critical information that helps explain user behavior.
Here’s an example of how heatmaps work for your business. Let’s say that you have a landing page that has a low conversion rate among mobile users.
You look at the heatmap and see that people get about a third of the way down the page and then leave. The email sign up form is in the lower half of the page. You’re losing a lot of opportunities to build up your list.
Based on that information, you decide to move the sign up form to the top third of the page. Your conversions skyrocket as a result of this change.
Finding Ways to Use Site Analytics
You have a ton of data at your disposal. How you use that data can make or break your business. It’s up to you to decide how to leverage that data to boost website traffic.
Not only do you want to use site analytics to boost traffic, but you want that traffic to take specific actions on your site. That’s how you’ll have a successful online business.
Head over to the Advertising section of this site for more creative ways to drive traffic to your site.
