Website statistics - a beginners guide
What Suffolk Businesses Should Know About Website Statistics
The beauty of the online world is that you can monitor everything and use the stats to your business advantage. But.. so little time, so much to do - so what's really important?
It's important to track a few key statistics on a regular basis and not get lost in the sea of numbers. Read on...
1) Visitors (new and repeat). This is the number of people who have come to your website for the first time or who are coming back for a second time. This is important, because this is the size of the pool of people from which you are trying to get leads. The bigger the number of visitors, the more potential for you to get leads.
Repeat visitors tend to be the ones who buy - on average it takes 8 visits for someone to buy/book - so you need to build these repeat visitors up, whilst also maintaining a flow of new visitors. On the Suffolk Guides our target ratio is roughly 70% new, 30% repeat visitors.
2) Leads. This is the number of visitors on your website who voluntarily give you their contact information. It could be sending you an email, signing up for your newsletter, or viewing a video, but there must be a form where they give you at least their email address and sometimes more information as well. This number is critical since your website leads are where your sales come from.
3) Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of your total website visitors who become a lead. So, if you had 100 visitors to your website today, and you generated 3 leads, that would be a 3% conversion rate. he conversion rate is important because it is telling you how efficient your website is at turning visitors into leads. Remember, you can double your company's number of leads by either doubling your website traffic or doubling your conversion rate. It is easier to double the conversion rate than the number of visitors so make sure you are capturing visitors inforamtion on your website. On the Guides we run competitions and offer a free newsletter to encourage people to give us their contact details so that we can then send them targetted information and offers to get more business for our clients.
4) Website Grade. we recommend a free tool at
Website Grader which gives you an excellent overview of the marketing effectiveness of your website, including things like your Google PageRank, number of inbound links and other key statistics. What is nice about the Website Grade is that it summarizes this all into one number from 1 to 100. You should know what your website grade is and track it over time to make sure you improve (or if you already get a good score, to make sure you don't slip.
5) Keyword Search Rank. For most business websites, the most efficient traffic and leads will come from organic search. This is the traffic that comes from people searching on Google, MSN and Yahoo and other engines and finding your website in the results. This traffic is not completely "free", since you need to work on your website to really optimise it, but it is usually much more cost effective than other sources. You need to know how you rank in the search engines for at least a few key terms related to your business, and you also want to know how that rank is changing over time - are you moving up or down - since that will determine the future success of your website visitors and leads.
If you'd like any more information just let us know - email info@suffolktouristguide.com or call us on 0845 362 7855
The beauty of the online world is that you can monitor everything and use the stats to your business advantage. But.. so little time, so much to do - so what's really important?
It's important to track a few key statistics on a regular basis and not get lost in the sea of numbers. Read on...
1) Visitors (new and repeat). This is the number of people who have come to your website for the first time or who are coming back for a second time. This is important, because this is the size of the pool of people from which you are trying to get leads. The bigger the number of visitors, the more potential for you to get leads.
Repeat visitors tend to be the ones who buy - on average it takes 8 visits for someone to buy/book - so you need to build these repeat visitors up, whilst also maintaining a flow of new visitors. On the Suffolk Guides our target ratio is roughly 70% new, 30% repeat visitors.
2) Leads. This is the number of visitors on your website who voluntarily give you their contact information. It could be sending you an email, signing up for your newsletter, or viewing a video, but there must be a form where they give you at least their email address and sometimes more information as well. This number is critical since your website leads are where your sales come from.
3) Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of your total website visitors who become a lead. So, if you had 100 visitors to your website today, and you generated 3 leads, that would be a 3% conversion rate. he conversion rate is important because it is telling you how efficient your website is at turning visitors into leads. Remember, you can double your company's number of leads by either doubling your website traffic or doubling your conversion rate. It is easier to double the conversion rate than the number of visitors so make sure you are capturing visitors inforamtion on your website. On the Guides we run competitions and offer a free newsletter to encourage people to give us their contact details so that we can then send them targetted information and offers to get more business for our clients.
4) Website Grade. we recommend a free tool at
Website Grader which gives you an excellent overview of the marketing effectiveness of your website, including things like your Google PageRank, number of inbound links and other key statistics. What is nice about the Website Grade is that it summarizes this all into one number from 1 to 100. You should know what your website grade is and track it over time to make sure you improve (or if you already get a good score, to make sure you don't slip.
5) Keyword Search Rank. For most business websites, the most efficient traffic and leads will come from organic search. This is the traffic that comes from people searching on Google, MSN and Yahoo and other engines and finding your website in the results. This traffic is not completely "free", since you need to work on your website to really optimise it, but it is usually much more cost effective than other sources. You need to know how you rank in the search engines for at least a few key terms related to your business, and you also want to know how that rank is changing over time - are you moving up or down - since that will determine the future success of your website visitors and leads.
If you'd like any more information just let us know - email info@suffolktouristguide.com or call us on 0845 362 7855
