Analyzing Your Own Website is the very last stage of website development and management when you analyze your efforts and figure out how you can improve your results. This stage of your business should be the core of your next moves and can be considered as the secret key to your website success.

As  mentioned before in the step of Tracking, your job is to find out what has worked and what has not. Then, you start testing different elements and techniques in order to discover the winner strategies. Now, it is time to sit down, prepare a report of your Tracking and Testing and Analyze the results. That way, you would be able to know how to remove the losers, avoid your mistakes and strengthen the winners. No wonder you will get promising results.

When it comes to Analyzing Your Own Website, it doesn’t matter if you do the job by yourself or ask someone else to do that for you. The only thing that matters is to list the most important factors of your website to be monitored and get to work on. But, what factors?

In this post, I am going to point out a few of the most important factors of your web stats information which play a very large role in your site effectiveness. If you want desired results, you’d better analyze each of the following information:

1. Number Of Hits & Visits:

Whether it is Unique Visitors or just Hits, you should be able to know how many visitors you have received in a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Also, you have to find out which days bring you the greatest hits. Moreover, you need to even know at what time your site gets the most visitors. These factor are all crucial for your analysis and help you get a better picture of your website performance.

2. Visits Per User:

Knowing if your visitors are unique and new or returning could determine if your site has been active over time. New and unique visitors are a good sign of being known and popular and is an elementary factor for branding purposes.

3. Average Time On Site:

This factor has a significant role in determining your site feedback. If people enjoy your website, they keep staying on your pages, browsing and navigating your links and getting the most out of your content. That way, you would be able to build a relationship with them and give them value. With that being said, your visitors may trust you and give you credit. So, the more you make people stay on your site, the better chance you have to convert them into buyers and customers.

If your audience don’t enjoy your website or don’t find what they are looking for, they will leave your site as quick as possible. So, your site must be very user friendly and offer the right solution to their problems as soon as they land on your site. Usually, most people leave a useless website in less than 30 seconds. So, your site should look like an eye-catching and outstanding website in the first look. Then, it must deliver the great content to the targeted audience. Sometimes, it is called the 5-second rule which means you must grab the attention of the visitor in the first 5 seconds of their visit. Otherwise, they will leave and won’t even look back.

4. Bounce Rate:

This data is very closely tied to the previous factor, Average Time a visitor spend on your site. Basically, it  refers as the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who bounce away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. They could click on a link and go to that website or type a new URL Address in their Internet Browser and leave the site. Eventually, some of visitors push the Back button or close the Window or Tab.

Bounce Rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low Bounce Rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the website. Although there is not any certain standard amount of maximum and minimum time for Bounce Rate, it can be determined by the session timeout of the analytic tracking software.

So, for having a more effective website, you should require your visitors to be active on your web pages and want them to stay and navigate instead of leaving instantly by providing them with high quality content. Since this data could be tracked quickly by some reliable tracking software, you will be able to get an accurate feedback of your website in a matter of days, not months and years.

5. Most Visited Pages:

The pages your audience visit most of the time can also be monitored and tracked. Knowing what pages have been seen by the majority of your visitors can help you find the winners and cut the losers. That way, you can improve your effectiveness of your site by increasing the quality of your Most Visited Pages and also put your Call-To-Action Elements on those web pages which can end up in very high conversion rates.

6. Referring Websites:

Referrers are web pages out of your site that have linked back to your website and referred their visitors to you. It is crucial to find out what other websites have sent you a flow of traffic. If you figure out that the referred traffic is targeted, then you should maintain and strengthen the source of that traffic and improve it. No matter if it is a simple blog, a newsletter or an authority website. As long as it works, it is worth working on.

7. Entry & Exit Pages:

Entry Pages are pages of your entire website that a visitor has entered from and Exit Pages are those that a visitor has exited the site from. Probably this data is tightly connected to the “Most Visited Pages” data, but it can more specifically show you how your site quality affects your visitors.

A powerful and attractive Entry Page can cause the visitor to fulfill the website’s goals. If people land on an attractive and interesting web page being asked what to do next, they will easily do it. On the other hand, an ugly and complicated Entry Page just confuses the user and makes them leave the site as quick as possible.

Discovering the Exit Page is also important especially if the people who leave don’t convert. You see, there should be a problem or a weak point on that web page that causes the visitor to exit the website without taking the desired action. That way, you would be able to improve the page and increase its quality. The bottom line is getting higher conversion rates.

8. Demographics:

Nothing is more important than finding out your audience Demographics Profile. If you don’t know what kind of people visit your website and take the desired action, how could you focus your efforts and improve the results? Your  Visitors’ Demographics Profile is an essential data for your Web Analysis.

While getting the accurate data about your site users’ information is not a simple task, it is doable by reliable tracking software. When it comes to Demographics Profile, information such as Location, Age and Sex come to our minds. However, some tracking efforts could end up in finding out more detail information such as Race, Income, Educational Attainment, Employment Status and so forth. Sometimes, you may even be able to know what kind of Internet Browser your visitors use and which Operative System they have on their computers. All of this data should be used to optimize your website for compatibility with as much audience as possible.

9. Search Engines:

Traffic from Referring Websites can be divided into many groups. One of the largest groups of traffic sources are Search Engines. Finding out which of them has sent you the most traffic can be monitored very closely and determined if it is effective or not.

Visitors who come directly from Search Engines are generally considered as targeted traffic. With that being said, you need to know the best referrers and analyze the results. Then, you can implement your techniques on other players and get similar results. Of course, each Search Engine has their own rules and strategies, but when it is doable in one of them, it is achievable in others, too.

10. Keywords and Key Phrases:

This data is tightly connected to the traffic from Search Engines and represents the words and phrases visitors typed in the Search Engines before finding your site in the results and clicking through it. This information is one of the most crucial data for analyzing your site traffic and Search Engine Optimization. If you find out what keywords your website has ranked on the search Engines for, you would be able to optimize your site better for getting more targeted traffic.

11. Click Through Rate:

This data is referred as the ratio of the users who clicked on a link on a web page by the number of times that link was shown. It could be an advertisement, an affiliate offer or a link to other web page of your website. Whatever it is, you should be able to track the Click Through Rate (CTR) data and Analyze your results. Sometimes, by just changing the position of an ad or its color, you could get tremendously higher CTRs.

12. Conversion Rate:

Finally, it all ends here: Conversion Rate. A data that represents the ratio of visitors who convert into a desired action by the total number of visitors. No matter if it is impressions, clicks, a simple download, free sign up, a trial or a purchase. You need to know how many people have converted, what’s the percentage and how you can improve it. With some reliable tracking software, it is possible to determine a desired action or completed goal and check if you have received any result or not.

While there are tons of Tracking and Analyzing Programs out there that can help you monitor your website and find out the weak and powerful points, I can only recommend one FREE program. As mentioned before, it is called Google Analytics and empowers everyone to test, track and analyze their site traffic with tons of compelling features.

By Analyzing Your Own Website you could tweak your site performance and deliver the exact thing your audience is looking for. You might not overlook this step if you want better results.

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All the Best,

Hooshmand Moslemi