Analytics reports show data on visitors to your site

Last month I discussed the use of Web analytics packages to gather information on visitors to your company's Web site.

This month I'll summarize a few common reports that can be used to improve your Web site's effectiveness.

The key to making sense of often overwhelming analytics data is to clearly define the desired outcomes:

What goals are you trying to measure?

For example, if you're running a promotion that's valid only in the U.S., you can probably ignore the data about international visitors.

Content Popularity: This report ranks the most popular pages on your site by the number of page-views. Heavily visited pages might be structured well, or could be popular due to an offline promotion, such as a print advertisement that directed readers to the page. Conversely, pages that are important to your business but are low in popularity may need reworking or additional promotion.

Referrers: Referrer reports can help you decide which sites are most effective at sending visitors. You can then tailor a marketing program to increase your site's exposure. You can also tie the referral data into marketing goals — for example, to determine how many referrals from a given site result in a newsletter download or a product purchase.

Search Engine Keywords: The keywords used by visitors can tell you a great deal about what they need from your site. If your site is not ranking highly for the keywords that you expect, consider doing some search engine optimization or using additional keywords.

Bounce Rate: This measurement reveals the number of visitors who exit your site from the same page at which they arrived. It also takes into account the minimum time (defined by the particular analytics package) that a visitor spends on a page. Bounce rates are useful to analyze why certain parts of your site may not be capturing your visitors' attention, but they're even more useful when combined with referrer and search engine data. Doing so can help you decide whether you're getting your money's worth from search engine promotions, or if your site is being inappropriately linked from other sites.

Conversion Rate: Good analytics packages can trace the path that visitors take on your site and measure progress toward a goal, such as the percentage of visitors who register for a promotion after reading several pages of product information.

For an e-commerce site, this information can be vital to understanding why visitors abandon their shopping carts - a common problem in many online ordering systems.

When experimenting with improvements to your site structure, use conversion rates to determine which of several page prototypes is the most effective.

Taken together, analytics reports could indicate the need for minor tweaks to your site, or a complete overhaul.

These reports are often the first step in getting a complete review by a usability professional, something that every company should consider to maximize the impact of a Web marketing program.

Web development is a cyclical process of continuous improvements, and the ongoing use of analytics reports can help make each cycle more effective than the last.