You have a web site. You have web site visitors. You even have web site sales. Everything seems to be working: why should you go through the effort to track and analyze your web site traffic? The importance of tracking your site traffic lies in the fact that proper web traffic analytics will help you answer these key questions:

• Am I reaching my target market?
• How are people interacting with my site?
• Where is my site traffic coming from?

Tracking your site traffic will allow you to see how people proceed through your site, where they spend their time, what they do, and any problems they may be encountering. And that information can help you significantly improve their user experience – and your sales.

By tracking your site traffic, you will be able to see trends as they unfold: trends in who is coming to your site, how they are interacting with it, what they want, how they buy, etc. Always have a clear action path for your users. Make sure you have easily identifiable steps if you want them to contact you (lead generation). Are these steps included in your web tracking? If not, maybe it’s time to add them.

1. Monitor your core engagement metrics. To improve these metrics, have a clear “Calls-to-Action) and add “take-away” items such as free reports, PDF’s, coupons, and other relevant content to your website on a regular basis.

I’ve been working on an expression formula using web analytics that represents most of the important variables in search marketing. A holistic approach to SEO demands a more robust explanation of how all the individual aspects of a web site interact with each other to produce great web visibility leading to more traffic.

Initially this formula deals with website attraction and how targeted prospects find a web site during search. The second part of the search marketing formula uses web analytics to uncover key performance elements of a web site and how each plays a role in converting visitors to customers.

The subsequent article contains information that will assist you when you build a web site. When I speak with clients regarding their
business websites, I strongly recommend that when they create a web site, it needs to uphold their business objectives. To me, their professional website is an extension of their overall business and must support their business objectives. Following a review of their overall enterprise objectives and evaluating their website, I then address some of these issues:

• How will their business make money?
• Who is their primary intended audience?
• What do they want their business website to accomplish?
• How can their web site be used to help their business?

If your are looking to make your own web site out of necessity, will you ponder this, too many professional sites are poorly planned and not very well thought out leaving these sites under-utilized. A successful business website is a more than just a nice design. To many business owners, it’s better to build a web site, any website, no matter how poorly it is thought out and designed. To be truly successful online, and generate ROI, you must look at how your website will positively support your business.

When your business is all web-based, it is much more important to identify your website’s objectives and how it will support your small business. A well designed and clearly defined website operating a web-based business will not distract your visitors, it will draw their eyes to those actions which make your business money.

Clearly identified “calls to action” are critically important your overall plan and to website conversions. When you build a web site, remember that success and value from your web site must be monitored and measured. Your website metrics should support the core metrics of your overall business. As an example of a metric, you might want to measure the number of unique website visitors to the number of website generated leads.

I hope this information above was useful. Thanks for reading, and if you make your own web site or have it done professionally, good luck creating a successful website that supports your business objectives.