Getting the most out of your website

Below is a brief outline of nearly every report and feature available in Google Analytics (a free system for tracking your return on investment). Over time, we will release a full page explanation on every report available to help you get the most out of your website.   

Dashboard

The dashboard provides you with a simple snapshot of all traffic to your website over a rolling 30 day period (that can be customized to any time period you prefer). The Dashboard provides you with a chart of daily visitors over the past 30 days, a count of total visitors over 30 days, page views, average number of pages loaded per visit, bounce rate (% of users that load one page and leave the site), Average time users spent on the site, and a % of new visitors compared to the whole. The Dashboard can also give you a snapshot of a defined geographic area, like a state, country or the whole world with a heat map overlay to show you where most of your users come from geographically. You can also get a pie chart showing where your visitors came from (in other words how they found you) whether it be through a Search Engine, Typing in your address direct/clicking a bookmark, or clicking a link from a referring website. You can also get a list of the top 5 most popular pages on your site and the top 5 sites that referred traffic to your site. In every way, the Dashboard is an incredible tool to help you gain a quick understanding of how people interactive with your website.

Learn more about the people using your website

This section will provide you with all available details about the people using your website. You can learn things like the web browser they are using to hit your website, the speed of their internet connection, the number of visits, unique visitors, pageviews, average pageviews per visit, average time spent on the site, bounce rate, new visits, and more!
 
This information can be essential when trying to measure the success of offline (and online) advertising campaigns. If you see a spike in traffic on the days that your ads are running then you can measure the success, if you don't see a spike in traffic, then you're probably not getting much return on your investment.

Benchmarking

Have you ever wondered how well your website is performing compared to the websites of similar size and scope? Well, wonder no more. Our benchmarking tool will provide you with all of the graphs and charts for
all of the major measurable metrics you need to fully understand how your website compares to other sites of comparable size.

Where in the world are my visitors?

The Map overlay feature will tell you exactly where in the world they are. This tool provides you with a map of the entire world and when you place your cursor over any country you can see how many people used your website within each country. The map is also "usage sensitive" this means that the hottest countries show up in dark green, while the countries with the least usage show up in the light green and the countries with no usage show up in tan.

Where in the US are my visitors?

The Map overlay doesn't just assume that every business does business internationally just because of your on the web. You can click any country to get a regional breakdown of traffic and in the US that means you can get a heat map of every state in the country!

Where in the state are my visitors?

Are you a local small business? Well, we have a map for you too. If you click on any state in the US, you will get a statewide breakdown of your traffic to show you which cities most of your visitors are from. This is a GREAT tool if you're trying to expand into a new city. Why do we say that? Because we used this tool to help us determine where our services were most popular and it has catapulted our growth plans!!

New Vs Returning

It's important to have a lot of new visitors on your website, but often it just as important that people return to your website. This feature will help you determine the ratio of new visitors to returning
visitors over a given period of time, complete with pie charts, and visitor graphs.

Do you do business in multiple languages?

This feature will help you understand the number and percentage of users that speak different languages. For a growing business, this can be a helpful indicator for timing the release of a language specific version of your website.

Visitor Trending

Here you can get a daily breakdown of visitors (down to the hour), unique visitors, pageviews, averages, time spent on the site per day and average daily bounce rate. This information can also be helpful in determining the effectiveness of an offline (or online) campaign.

Visitor Loyalty

It's quite interesting to learn the percentage of users that hit your website once and never return, compared to the percentage of users that hit your website 101-200 times per month. Oh yes, some people will return to your website that often and now you can keep track of them.

Visitor Recency

Would you like to know the time span between visits? In other words of the people that visited your website more than once in the past 30 days, how much time elapsed between their last visit (up to one year ago). Yeah, this system can tell you that too.

Length of Visit

The Analytics system can even tell you how many people spent 0-10 seconds on your site compared to the number of people that spent 30 minutes or more on your site.

Depth of Visit

The length of a visit can be important, but it's also important to know the Depth of Visits, in other words, forget the amount of time your visitors spend on the website, let's focus on how many pages they loaded. We can tell you that too and this chart will adjust to the total number of pages on your website too.

Visitor Capabilities

These stats for the super-geeks in your organization. This section will tell you things like which browsers and which browser versions people are using to access your website, what operating system they are running, screen color settings, Java support and for those of you with Flash-based websites, you can learn how many of your users can actually see the flash component display properly. You can also learn who the top service providers are for your clients and the speed with which they connect to the internet.

Mobile Visitors

In recent years we have seen a tremendous increase in Mobile usage and you might be surprised to find out how many people are accessing your website with a mobile device. This can be especially important if your customers need to use your website on the go, and even more important if your website uses flash. This tool will tell you how many iphone/iPad users are on your site that can't see the flash components, which can often render your site useless.

How are people finding my website?

The Traffic Source section of Google Analytics explains very clearly how people are finding your site and where they are coming from.

Traffic Source Overview

The Overview provides you with a breakdown of three main traffic sources

• Direct Traffic - Someone that types your website address directly into their browser OR someone that clicks on a bookmarked link.
• Referring Sites - This refers to visitors that arrived on your website because they were on someone else's website, found a link to you and clicked on it. This does not include search engines.
• Search Engines - This only includes traffic generated by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc...

The Traffic Source Overview will also give you a list of the top 5 referring sites (other sites on the web that refer the most traffic to your site), and the top 5 keywords that users enter into a search engine to find you. This is incredibly valuable information if you're trying to improve traffic to your site.

Direct Traffic

This section breaks down all of your visitors that either type you address directly into a browser OR click a bookmark to go to your website. You can learn things like the total number of direct visitors, their average time on the site, bounce rate, pages loaded per visit and the percentage of new visitors
 

Referring Sites

Where the Overview page will show you the top 5 sites that refer traffic to your website, this section will show ALL sites that refer traffic to your website over a given time. You can also break down these visitors by total visits, pages loaded per visit, average time on the site, % of new visitors, and bounce rate.

Search Engine Traffic

This section provides the same visitor breakdowns as the Direct Traffic section and the Referring Sites section, but this tool allows you to see what search engines are pushing the most traffic your site. Our Search Engine Optimization specialists use this page frequently when you deploy our Search Engine Optimization Services to improve traffic to your website.

Keywords

This is another incredibly valuable tool when trying to improve the search engine visibility of your website. This tool allows you to see what keywords people are using in search engines to find your website. The keywords listed here are keywords that someone has used in a search engine and then clicked on your link to go to your website. If you don't see the keywords that you think you should see on this list, that's a pretty good indicator that you could benefit from our search engine optimization services.

Content Content Overview

The Content Overview page shows you the total number of pageviews over a given time period, the total number of unique views and the bounce rate. This is also where you can find a list of your most popular pages of content. You find a list of the top 5 most popular pages on your website by a number of page views.

Top Content

This section will display a list of every page on your site that received a pageview sorted by most popular to least popular. This section will help you understand what your visitors are looking for when they arrive on your website. This may also help you understand how to best market to them

Content Overlay

The content overlay is a REALLY cool feature if you know how to use it. When you click "Content Overlay" your home page will load with a small percentage number next to every link on the entire website. This percentage number indicates the total percentage of people that have clicked that link relative to all other links on your homepage, and if you navigate to another page deeper in your website, the percentages will show up on those pages too. This is a really great way to find out what people are clicking on. This can help you position your content better, and it can help you write better link titles to help drive more traffic.

Site Search

If your website uses Google Site Search so your visitors can search for things on your website, then we can tie that into Google Analytics to tell you exactly what keywords people are using to search through your site.

Goals

You can also set certain traffic goals to work towards over time and then track your progress in working toward those goals. Goals can include anything from improving traffic to the site, to increasing checkouts, registrations, video plays, downloads, etc...

Conclusion

Sites designed by Cybernautic produce real results and to prove it we encourage you to use Google Analytics FREE so you can see the results that your site is producing! And if you want to improve the results to your website, contact us today for a traffic assessment. We can help find more targeted traffic so you can improve leads and sales.