With other forms of advertising it is difficult to track the exact effectiveness of it. If you place an advert in a newspaper then you may have an increased number of calls but you do not know how many people looked at your advert or the percentage that called you. With a website you can get a lot more information.

We would advise all of our clients to add Google analytics into their website in order to track their visitors. This will enable them to make changes to their website in order to increase the effectiveness of their website. The key points that will help you with your website are below:

1. Traffic Sources

You can see the websites that your visitors are coming from and also the page from a particular website. In addition you can see the search engines that are referring people to you and the keywords that they are using to find you.

2. Bounce Rate

This shows you the percentage of people that come to your site and lead immediately. You should always aim for a bounce rate of less than 50% and so this should be monitored. The one advantage to this is that you can check the bounce rate per referring site, search engine and keyword. This will really help you to see which referring sites are working for you. If you find you have an advert on your site and the bounce rate is 80% you will know that you are not giving people what they want. In order to change this there may be things you need to change on your website or change the advert to attract different visitors. However it may also tell you that an advert on that website is not right and so you can stop it, save some money and place an advert elsewhere.

3. Pages Visited

You can see how long people spend on your site and the path they take while they are there. Once you have an idea of where people are going you can target them more directly. This also shows you where your visitors are leaving. If you have a page where a huge percentage of people are leaving then that will tell you need to make changes to stop people leaving and increase your sales.

4. Conversions

You can set up your Google analytics to track the conversions that you make and you can determine what a conversion is. So it could be people filling out a contact form or someone signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a document. Whatever it is you can track it. The aim is to get as high a percentage of visitors to a conversion and by monitoring the rest of the analytics you can change things to increase this number.

If you have a website and are not using analytics then you are shooting in the dark. Why would you do that when you can add a programme for free and see exactly what your potential customers are doing.