You’ve put your business online with a website. You’ve even taken the next step and started to market your online business with Search Engine Optimization. Now what? Getting visitors to your website is important, but it’s also important to understand how they are interacting with your website. Website analytics (the tracking of traffic to and on a website) helps website owners understand their online customers, potential customers and their interactions with their site.

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Tracking data over time – a website analytics program can help keep records of the number of pages viewed, visitors, search engine traffic and much more data over the course of hours, days, weeks, months and years. Not only is this helpful for month to month information, but it can also reveal trends such in seasonality, economic influences, etc. In addition, this is a great way to analyze the impact other advertising (such as a billboard or radio commercial) is having on a website.

Learn more about customers – website traffic tracking programs can reveal a lot about the visitors that come to a website such as: how visitors got to the site, how long they stayed, if they came back, where the visitor is located, what terms or keywords they searched, which Search Engine they used and if they are finding the products they are searching for are among some of the types of information available.

Most popular pages – knowing what pages website visitors are looking at the most can be helpful when determining if more “call to action” options are needed to help get those visitors to convert into leads and contact you.

Geographic areas – knowing what countries, states and cities website visitors (or lack of visitors) are located can bring to light where marketing efforts may need to be increased or pulled back.

Extra features – like most things, no two website analytics programs are exactly the same and can offer a variety of special features. For example, VisiStat, the website traffic tracking program utilized by Commercial Web Services, has a feature that shows where website visitors actually click on the site. This is a terrific tool to see what areas of the website attract people’s attention in order to make use of those areas of a website better.

Website analytics is not only useful for optimizing a website but also for optimizing an entire marketing strategy.

–    Diana Richardson, Lead Search Specialist, Commercial Web Services