Statistcs on the wedsite and your visitors – what do you know?At the very least you should know these six things: How many visits did your site get this month? -how does it compare to last month (or last year) -how many are returning visitors and how many are first time visitors (if you have a blog – you should be seeing a larger returning number)How many pages did your visitors visit? -Is that number going up or down (if you made a change to your site – did it effect this number) -If the number is low – what page are most people leaving on? What happens when you change the information or links on that page? -What is the top three top landing page(how people enter your site) -If 90% of visitors are going to your photogallery when is the last time you added images to your galleryWhere are visitors coming from? -You can separate them into – Search (Google, etc), Referral (Visitor clicked a link to your site), Direct (user typed in your web address), and Campaign (Paid Advertisements) -Which search terms are getting you visitors -If you are using web advertising or have link exchanges (which are working) -If you have a facebook page – how many visitors are coming from there and should you add more information to that page)Where do your vistors live? -What country and city are visitors coming fromHow are visitors viewing your pages? -If more and more people are using a Mobile devise (do you have a mobile site? At the very least how does your site look on a mobile device?) -If you have Flash on your site – what percentage of visitors don’t have Flash installed (iPad or iPhone)
What else can you find out?However analytics can now generate 100’s different reports  -which buttons are the most clicked on your site, which never get clicked -Show which product or service is the most visitors (is this seasonal and how can that effect your advertising because it should) -What is the goal of your site – is it that someone makes an order, downloads a form, fills in a reservation form? then that should be a goal and you can tell – not only what percentage of visitors completed that goal but at what point they dropped out of your site? This is called a “sales funnel”.  For example – If you have 100 people a month clicking on your contact form but only 20 completed the form – there is a problem with the form -Evaluate print and other traditional media (or even QR codes).  Whe you give a newspaper your link in an add you can add some tags to the end of the link and tell exactly how many people cam efrom that add or QR code etc. -Site search – if you have a search button on your site – you can track what people are looking for (if you don’t have that on your site – add it)
On-line Advertising: (display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing)With google anylitics you can tell: -which ads are driving the most visitors to your site, it track the performances of your marketing campaigns, including AdWords, Adsense and emails and much, much more. -Are website visitors coming from advertising doing what you want them to do (purchase a product, register for a whitepaper, etc.) Optimize Google AdWords – Google Analytics works hand-in-hand with Google AdWords (Google’s popular digital advertising platform) to tell you not only which AdWords campaigns are driving traffic to your site but which campaigns are yielding conversions (and making you money)!
If you are not paying attention to what your customers want, quite obviously you will eventually lose market share to a competitor who is.