With the new year approaching and another year winding down, it’s that time again. You guessed it. It’s analytics time!
Figuring out your data and how well your year went isn’t an easy task. There’s so much to look at — conversion rates, engagement, ROI, etc. So what should you be looking at when analyzing the past year? Here’s 5 of our top analytics to review from 2014 and to watch for in the new year.
1. Conversion Rates
No matter what your business is or what services you provide, conversion rates should always be near the top of your analytics list. A conversion rate is simply taking a visitor to your site and having them initiate an action that you want them to take. If you increase your conversion rate, your sales are ultimately going to increase as well.
No matter how much time and effort you put into your website, there’s always going to be room for improvement. What we’re saying is there is no such thing as a perfect website. So with conversion rates, you’ll understand what is working and what isn’t. Wouldn’t you like to know what is leading your visitors to take action on your site and what isn’t? We certainly do. And even better, it’s typically free. You just have to take the time to look and see what is working and what isn’t working with your current visitors, and make some tweaks based on the analytics.
2. Return On Investment (ROI)
This is the one stat that just about every business owner asks about, and they should. Your ROI is the incremental gain from your business operation divided by its cost. This is basically telling you whether or not your game plan is working or if something needs to be changed. Of course, you can always segment your ROI to really dig in on what is working and what isn’t.
Another good thing about studying your ROI is you can use it to see how you compare to your competition. Just because you have a positive ROI doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing everything correctly. Perhaps your competition is putting up better numbers, which means it’s time to make a change.
3. Bounce Rate
Knowing which pages your visitors are leaving from right away is good to know. It means something on that page (broken links, lack of navigation, etc.) is turning away your visitors. You could start by perhaps redesigning the entrance to your landing pages. Perhaps the first page your visitors land on wasn’t the page they were intending to find. You can change this by optimizing these pages so they correlate better with the keywords that are bringing your visitors to your site. Changing your ads and keywords to better reflect the page will help.
4. Average Time On Site
This is similar to bounce rate because you want visitors to remain engaged with your content. If your average time is low, it means your content isn’t keeping your visitors interested, and a change is required. The content you put on each page is what is going to either keep your visitor engaged or turn them away. Be sure to write well-written, useful information that is easy to navigate and easy to find. You don’t want your visitors landing on pages they weren’t trying to find.
5. Rate Of Return
Your site’s popularity isn’t necessarily based on the amount of traffic, but it’s based on the quality of traffic. You want to find visitors who are coming back to your site. These people are your potential customers.
When we say quality traffic, we mean visitors who are interested in your product or service. Many times you’ll have visitors who land on your site by mistake, and that’s not a visitor you want. You have to look at every page as an entry point to your site. Be sure each page has good keyword phrases so your visitors are sure of what to expect when visiting your site.
In The End
Hopefully you can look back on 2014 and view it as a success. As we mentioned before, nothing is perfect and there is always room for improvement. Thankfully, analytics has made the process of making improvements much simpler and easier to accomplish. By using analytics, you can take what you worked on in 2014, see the results and make the proper changes to gear up for another great run in 2015!
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