Google analytics is my choice and recommendation to any one. Quite honestly I just think awstats is very inaccurate and more complexed to measure things. It picks everything up as a unique visitors. With Google analytics is eliminates a lot of the other stuff that aw stats don’t and I would have to say its by far more accurate which there is some things to pay attention to when viewing the dashboard. Such as Bounce Rate, Page Views, Unique Visits, Content, and yadi yadi yadi. Anyways take a look at items below and this is generally how I measure websites.

1. Unique Visitors, Of course every one checks this, which of course this identifies how many “new” visitors you have had.
2. Bounce Rate, I love this feature gives you an idea of your bounce rate. Which a lot of people don’t pay attention to this, for example I was talking to a buddy the other day that runs a seo company and hes up in the high 6 digits as take home money. I asked him how is your bounce rate, and at first he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then I was like do you pay attention to the bounce rate, and he said no. I was quite surprised he mainly said he just paid attention to his traffic and how well it was converting which is pretty fair way of telling, but every once and awhile it don’t hurt to check your bounce rate just depends on the person. The bounce rate identifies the users that leave from the landing page, so say for example someone searched Google for one of your keywords well then they visit your site if they leave on that first landing page with out going to any other pages then your bounce rate will be higher. That comes to tell you that they just click on the link, and land at your page then exit. Which is not good. You have to have something that swirls them in there to check out your services or whatever you have to offer generally a bounce rate of 50-60 percent is good.
3. Average Time on Site, This is another nice option to pay attention to. It gives you an idea of how long certain users are visiting your site. Which granted this can depend on content and etc. Generally if you have more content that involves more reading the time on site will be higher, so just experiment and figure out whats working :).
4. Traffic Sources, I like this feature gives you an idea of where your traffic is coming from such as Google, Yahoo, Msn, or any other sites. Generally on search engines Google always runs higher speaking that it has the biggest market share of course in the search world by far.
5. Keywords, Under the traffic source tab drop down you can identify what keywords are being search for, this is another great feature. You can identify what keywords are coming up in the serps before you even know it. Someone might be searching for a keyword that you don’t even know its on the 2nd page, but as you get more experience you’ll start to know what keywords are coming up and what are not coming up. Another great thing about the keyword feature is that you can tell how many visits a certain keyword is getting, average time on site for that keyword, bounce rate of given keyword, and plus more.
6. Content, Under the content tab you can tell what pages are getting the most visits. So if you have a page out there that is getting no traffic, but has some valuable services or content you can start optimizing that page for certain keywords and then watch how the traffic flows to it.

Google analytics has so many options that you can use to analyze your website traffic and etc. Which I’ll be honest half the stuff in there I don’t even pay attention to at certain times, but then other time it comes into use. Just depends on what I’m aiming for or doing. I mainly try to see how well my traffic is converting for certain pages. The thing is search engine traffic is where you will find the best clients and make the best sales of course. Social media traffic is great to, but overall search engine traffic converts the best at a lower end traffic, but then again that depends. Social Media is really good for building social networks and can create a word of mouth effect, plus its good for links on your site which will help with the organic listings.

If your aiming for more traffic I would suggest every one installing a blog on there site, and build links to there site. That way you getting it from both ends, and the success rate is higher by far. Just takes time, analyzation, link building, and more time :).

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.