6 Key Statistics To Gauge The Health of Your Website

TweetGoogle Analytics is a powerful, free tool that you should be using to gauge the health of your website.

If you don’t have a website statistics package installed on your site, I recommend getting one installed immediately — even if you don’t plan on monitoring it — you will likely want those statistics in the future.

Comparing Data In Google Analytics

The most illuminating use of website statistics comes from comparing data month over month, week over week, or for those that run micro businesses that are seasonal, comparing for example December 2008 with December of 2009.

Google Analytics makes it very easy to view and analyze these types of comparisons.  Use this comparison feature to analyze the trends you see from one time period to the next.

You will be able to make business decisions based on this trend data.

You can access the date range from your Google Analytics dashboard.

Key Statistics To Monitor Growth

Is your website growing?  Is it dying?  How do you know?

Google Analytics can tell you.

These are the three key statistics to monitor the growth of your site:

Visits – You should be seeing an overall growth of Visits month over month.  In the image below you can see the (+9.41%) that is showing a growth in Visits.  On the other hand, the percentage of “New Visits” in the lower right has dropped slightly indicated in red by the (-0.71%).

You can access this statistic from your Google Analytics dashboard (home page).

Absolute Unique Visits -  Absolute Unique Visitors is a measurement of the number of unique IP addresses that accessed your site over the period.  This is considered a greater measurement of growth as it removes visits from the same person (or at least from the same IP address).

You can access this statistic by clicking on the “Visitors” tab and then viewing the “Overview.”

Traffic Sources – View the three different sources of traffic to your site.  Your traffic is either coming from Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc), Referring Sites (these are other websites that have links to your website) or Direct Traffic (visitors that typed in your web address in their browser or had your site bookmarked.)

Ask questions like:

Which keywords are sending me the most traffic?
Is Twitter sending me any traffic at all?
Is Bing sending me more traffic than Yahoo?
Is my email campaign working?

All of these answers and more are available in the “Traffic Sources” tab.  Now drill down into the data and find out where you should be spending your time and money.

You can access this statistic by clicking on the “Traffic Sources” tab and then viewing the “Overview.”

Key Statistics To Monitor Your Content

These are the most important statistics.  They will answer these questions:

Does anyone care about what you are doing on this website?  Do they like it?  Do they hate it?

These next three statistics can all be found on the Dashboard (home page) of Google Analytics.  These statistics measure the level of engagement that your visitors are having with your site.  If they are interested in what you are doing with your business, you should see a growth trend in these next three statistics.

Pages/Visit – You should be seeing growth in the average number of pages your visitors are accessing per visit month over month.  This shows that visitors are clicking around on your site and engaging with your content and your business.

Bounce Rate -  This is a tricky one.  You actually want to see this percentage dropping month over month.  The Bounce Rate is a measurement of the percentage of visitors that visit your site and then immediately exit your site.

Average Time On Site -  You should be seeing an upward trend in the number of seconds that people are spending on your website.  This shows that they are spending more of their precious time engaging with your business and your content.

Ask questions like:

How can I increase the amount of time that people are spending on my site?
Why do X percentage of visitors bounce off of my site?
How can I make it easier for visitors to visit more pages on my site per visit?

Create great content on your website and all of these statistics will improve.

Google Analytics and WordPress

As you know if you have been reading my blog long —  I ♥ WordPress.  Few internet marketers and bloggers would disagree with the fact that WordPress is the undisputed champion of all blogging platforms.

The reason I mention WordPress in this post about statistics is because there are several plug-ins for WordPress that make installing the Google Analytics statistics program very easy.  My plug-in of choice is Google Analyticator.