Five items you should be measuring regularly:
- Number of distinct visitors – be careful that you are not tracking the number of hits instead. The difference is that unique visitors are measured by their special IP address and are counted only once no matter how many times they visit your site.
- Number of pages viewed – knowing this information will indicate how effective your calls to action are.
- How long pages are being viewed – knowing this information will let you know how engaged visitors are feeling with your site. If they stay less than two minutes on average, it’s time for some re-vamping.
- Which pages visitors generally exit from – knowing this will clue you into which pages should be updated immediately.
- Track specific pages that you recently made changes to – see if this has made an improvement
The tools needed to track this information and gain better results from your website are available! Ask your website designer or hosting company to add on a program like this. Let the statistics guide you to what your next website move should be. If after a few months, you see that visitors are clicking off your site immediately, create a plan and budget for a site re-do.
Likewise, if you realize that you are not getting the number of visitors you would like, look into a program to increase the number of visitors. Otherwise your website is just an expense and not an investment making you money.