Do You Read Your Statistics?

If you don’t, then you need to start.

Analytics (or statistics) are the single most important source of information from your website that is available without spending thousands on focus groups, heat map testing, etc. Even companies who can afford the latter options of website information still rely heavily on statistics software for revising their website or attemtping to bring more customers in.

The beauty of Analytics really lies in its ease of use. Anyone can go into the program, look at the charts on the homepage and have a solid idea of what’s happening with their website. The charts are beautifully laid out and the statistics are generally easy to use. The information contains so much insight that you could increase your conversion significantly just by making small changes based on your Analytics.

If the statistics look daunting to you, here’s some basic interpretation of some of them:

Visits: How many people (overlapping) visited your website
Unique Visitors: How many individual people visited your website (If you were to visit your site three times, it would three visits, but only one unique visit)
Pageviews: How many pages total were viewed by your visitors
Pages Per Visit: On average, how many pages each visitor viewed
Avg Visit Duration: On average, how long each visitor stayed on your site
Bounce Rate: What percentage of people leave the site after seeing one page
New Visits: How many people visited your website for the first time

You can also break down visitors by where they’re geographically visiting from, what site referred them, which pages they viewed, what order they viewed the pages, the web browser they use, the kind of computer they use, and on and on and on.

If you don’t use Analytics now, you’re wasting your own time and money by ignoring it.