Mining your data can provide information that helps you improve your website and content. Image: Flickr / blprnt / CC-BY
There are hundreds of thousands of ways to measure the success of a website; content marketers often focus on statistics like time-on-page, number of hits and bounce rate. Even the most basic analytics, however, provide a wealth of other useful information that affiliates and businesses can make use of.
Look for imbalances
First, you should take a close look at your analytics to identify any major imbalances. Is a huge amount of your traffic coming from Bing instead of Google? From one focus keyword instead of another? Are visitors who land on one landing page converting significantly more than visitors on another landing page? Compare apples to apples and find any place that the statistics simply do not match. Those imbalances provide a wealth of information about how your website is found and used. Digging into imbalances can provide insight that will help you improve your targeting, keyword selection, and your conversion pages.
For example, Google accounts for about 65 percent of all search queries online and Bing accounts for 15 percent. If more than 15 percent of your traffic from search engines comes from Bing, the search engine is likely indexing or ranking your site more highly for some reason.
Pay close attention to return visits
On the web, return visitors are gold. These are the visitors who have been to your website and decided that it was valuable enough to come back. Split out the return visitor demographic and pay attention to how they come back: Do they search another keyword and come back to your site (which could indicate they feel your site is trustworthy about that topic)? Or did that return visitor come back as a direct visit, remembering enough about your site to actually type in the URL in their web browser (which could indicate that they are very interested in your product or service)? Or did that visitor return to the same page, time and time again, indicating that they are reading the information multiple times, trying to make a decision or utilizing that information for their own purposes? Figure out who your return visitors are and be sure to make your website easy for them to use.
Map the path
Visualizing the path that people take through your website can help you identify what kind of questions the visitors are trying to answer. Many analytics tools will help you visualize this path, though you can also create your own path map by recording landing pages and links clicked. If visitors are coming in on your homepage and consistently visiting another page immediately, it may be worth putting that second page’s information on your first page in order to provide the information more immediately. If visitors who visit a certain second or third page in the path are much more likely to convert, take a close look at what about that second page is helping them make the final decision.
Find a direction for your content
After months or years of creating content on one topic or in one topic area, it can feel tough to come up with something fresh. Take a close look at your analytics to determine what types of topics or which types of content are resulting in the most or the best visits. Compare the traffic you get to your editorial calendar to match topic areas to traffic. If how-to posts get the most and best traffic, focusing a bit more time there could provide greater returns. If personal experiences get the best hits, share a bit more. Every website, every demographic, every visitor base is different, so knowing what works best for your visitors can help re-energize your content creation.
