When you’re promoting your business online, there are a lot of numbers and statistics to track. If you have a website set up for your business, one of the numbers that you’re going to be tracking often is your website’s traffic. Website traffic is the backbone to any successful online business. Without traffic, people aren’t going to be seeing your products or reading your content. With that said though, you don’t simply want to track the total number of people who are visiting your website because that total number can be misleading.
Marketing online is often a numbers game and due to that, it’s good to have a quick run down in regards to the website statistics that you should be looking at. Just because your website is receiving traffic, doesn’t mean it’s the right kind of traffic. The right kind of traffic includes people who are going to be interesting in what your website has to offer. For example, if you’re selling apparel on your website, the visitors who somehow end up on your site looking for home decor aren’t going to be the right kind of traffic.
When you’re viewing your website statistics in an attempt to determine whether or not your online marketing efforts are paying off, here are a few areas of interest to keep an eye on:
1. New visitors
2. Unique users/visitors
3. The time of day when people visit your website most
4. How long (on average) people stay on your website
5. How they find your website (organically in the search engines using keywords, a referring website, etc.)
6. Whether or not users are completing the action that you want them to complete.
In regards to number 6, if you sell products online, then your goal is to have visitors buy products. If your site is getting a lot of traffic but you’re not selling anything, it could give you an indication that people aren’t coming to your site looking for what you have to offer, or maybe there’s a problem on your website (such as poor navigation or users not feeling secure with the shopping cart system.)
The reason it’s so important to know what numbers to look at is because when you’re marketing your business online, your website traffic (or lack thereof) can make or break a business. If you’re looking at numbers and statistics that can help you determine what your next steps should be, you can pave a path to help you meet your goals.
