Web Site Analysis Tips
Read these 5 Web Site Analysis Tips tips to make your life smarter, better, faster and wiser. Each tip is approved by our Editors and created by expert writers so great we call them Gurus. LifeTips is the place to go when you need to know about Web Traffic tips and hundreds of other topics.
Monitor your site and make sure there are no broken links.
Technical snafus can cost you customers. Make sure that your site is always up, and make sure your links work. There are a variety of web site monitoring tools that can help you ensure that your site is technically sound. Server downtime and broken links will give new visitors a terrible first impression, and will undermine returning customers' confidence in your company. You have put your name on the line by submitting to search engines and creating PPC campaigns, so you must be vigilant about making certain the your site is in good working order.
Know which page your visitors enter your Web site.
Visitor tracking on your web site, especially tracking web site entry points, will help you understand how they are linking to your site and what they are looking for. Also, because it is imperative to capture your visitors' attention in the first few seconds that they are on that landing page, knowing where visitors land will help you focus your content development and design efforts to make that entry page “sticky.” Since a landing page is very often a “home” page, it is important to have rich content that answers basic questions about who you are, what you do and can offer, what your products and services are, and FAQs and Testimonials that will build interest and confidence for your visitors. If, by chance, your landing page is not a home page but an article or other page, be sure to link back to that key information about your company and its products and services.
Know which page your visitors use when leaving your Web site.
Tracking the page on which visitors exit your web site will help you identify successes and shortcomings of your web site. If visitors leave the home page or landing page, you might want to think about what products or content you are featuring on that page, and whether it really meets the needs of your visitors. Leaving this early can mean that users are not finding what they were looking for, and while you might get a number of web surfers who find you "by accident," you might also want to double check that your keywords are the best keywords you could be using, and consider narrowing the scope of those keywords to better focus on your target audience. Alternatively, you may find that users are spending a fair time on your site, accessing product information, and then leaving. This could imply that your site is effective in acquiring visitors and providing the content they seek. If this is the case, you can concentrate more on converting those visitors.
Understand relationship and business impact of visitors, leads, sales and earnings.
To really gauge the effectiveness of individual Internet marketing campaigns – or even a suite of online marketing efforts – it is important to know how people get to your site, what they do on the site, and whether visitors convert into leads and sales. Tracking leads and sales will help you perform cost-benefit analyses for campaigns, helping you better decide how to allocate your resources to create your most effective web marketing strategy.
Scrutinize your site's top exit pages to identify areas for improvement.
Leverage site path analysis to track a visitor's movements on your site, and look carefully at exit pages. While an ideal scenario might be to have a visitor find your site, explore it, complete a transaction, and then exit the site, there are plenty of cases of abandoned baskets and other early exits. Expecting anything else would be unrealistic, and you can probably expect to see a wide range of exit pages as visitors explore your site. However, if a high percentage of visitors are leaving on any particular page, you should review the page closely and consider modifications that would improve visitor retention. If the page is technically sound, focus on improving its content, thereby offering additional value to the visitor.
| Guru Spotlight |
| Byron White |
