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Most bloggers and content-producers on the Web seem to merely copy one another without truly determining exactly what works.
But if you have data on your website’s visitors–where they come from, what they do on the site, and so on–you easily learn where to best spend your time and even how best to design your site.
How effective are the links you share?
You probably have at least one social networking account. Most bloggers have two, three, or more. Regardless, you are likely using any platform you can to promote the content on your website.
The Pretty Links plugin for WordPress allows you track how many people click the links you personally share. You can then evaluate those clicks next to the total number of visitors from that source.
It may be a waste of your time to be on certain social networks.
What’s going on with your visitors?
For all other website data, Google Analytics is a free service which can provide all of the information you would ever need to know.
Once you sign up, drop the code they give into your website’s code (WordPress users will place it just before the closing “body” tag in the theme’s footer file.) Within 24 hours, you’ll see data.
You’ll be able to monitor:
- Visitors/unique visits
- Pageviews/pages per visit/bounce rate
- Average visit duration
- Visitor location/language
- Traffic sources/search terms
- Website speed
- Content performance
- …and much, much more
This information will not only direct you in where time is most efficiently spent, but it will even reveal potential flaws in your website’s design or in the content you produce.
Are you meeting your goals?
If you can define what you want your visitors to do when they reach your website–that is, your call-to-action–then you can use Google Analytics to track the success of that goal.
Once your goal is defined, you need a page on your website that visitors will land on once they’ve completed that goal. For instance, a confirmation page when visitors subscribe to your email list.
Define a URL Destination goal in Google Analytics:
- Open Analytics and click the Admin button (top-right).
- Click the Goals tab.
- Add a new goal:
- Choose URL destination
- Insert the Goal URL (this is your confirmation page)
- Select Head match
- Save
Create a custom dashboard to monitor your goal:
- Click Add New Dashboard (menu on the left)
- Select Blank Canvas
- Add a Table widget:
- Select Source/Medium as the column
- Select Goal 1 Completions as metric
- Select Goal 1 Conversion Rate as second metric
- Add a second Table widget:
- Select Page as the column
- Select Goal 1 Completions as metric
- Select Goal 1 Conversion Rate as second metric
- Add a Metric widget:
- Select Goal 1 Completions
- Add a Timeline widget
- Select Goal 1 Completions
Now, when someone completes your call-to-action, you can see where they came from, what page of the site they were on at the time, and what days they did it.
What is your conversion rate?
Once tracking is set up, you may be discouraged by low conversion numbers. To give you some perspective, it’s fairly common to see only two percent of visitors complete your call-to-action.
Last month, I had a link to my website shared on a Facebook page with over 300,000 fans. That link received only 500 clicks–less than one percent of those fans actually clicked the link.
The purpose of analytics is to guide you in ways you might improve your strategies and even your website design. Regardless of your numbers, strive to improve them.
Website showcase: Grace to You
The Grace to You website has one particular feature I love. It has the ability to search by scripture or Bible passages.
With WordPress, adding this same functionality would not be difficult. Simply utilize tags and/or categories. For instance, you could have tags like Matthew 12 or John 3.
