google analytics

Have you ever wondered what keywords and phrases your visitors are searching with? Your website statistics will tell you, mostly. If you're using Google Analytics, look at the Traffic Sources; here you'll find a list of keywords and phrases most commonly used to send visitors to your site, along with their popularity.

If most of your keywords are variations on your name or business name, you can assume those visitors were most likely looking for you but couldn't remember your web address.

My favorite part of Google Analytics is looking at what they can tell me about my site visitors. (If you're unsure what constitutes a "visit" in GA, refer back to this post here first.) Each time you load a web page in your browser by visiting that site, the logs track a tremendous amount of information about you. For instance, the  IP address of your computer isn't likely to change while you're surfing the web, and Google looks to see all the pages you visit in one session.

You've likely heard of a "Landing Page" before, but do you know what it is? At its most generic level, it simply means the first page that people "land on" when they visit your site. This is most often the home page, but not always. If your site is fully indexed in a search engine, people may click from the search engine to one of your lower-level pages (not the top-level home page). This is why it's so important to have a navigation menu on all pages of your site, in case someone lands on a lower-level page, you want to make it easy to find out more information about your organization.

When we first started looking at website statistics, everyone liked to compare how many hits they received. There was frequent puffing of the chest when you could proudly state that your site received 10,000 hits last month, when a friend or competitor's site perhaps only received 2,000. Little did most people realize how useless that statistic truly is.