When viewing your analytics and web metrics, you can get buried in the number of reports to view and how to make sense of it all. Here is a simple breakdown of reports to view each week and each month, in reference to Google Analytic titles. For Omniture, WebTrends and more, similar reports are available, I just referenced the titles of Google Analytics for familiarity and consistency.
Top 3 Reports to Review Each Week
Bounce Rate
This will tell you the percentage of people that are landing on your website and then leaving without moving forward with the second page of content. This will tell you how engaging your website is. Below 70% is about average, below 50% is good and below 35% is great. Bounce rate is extremely important for a website that requires conversion through payment, form completion or viewing multiple pages.
Referring Sites
This report will show you where people are finding your domain on the internet. This will include search engines (Google, Bing), along with other sites like Digg, Facebook and others. Track this to make sure you are familiar with the types of content people are finding on the web. If you have put more emphasis on driving traffic from social media, this is where you can target the amount of traffic you are seeing from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.
Top Keywords
Along with referring sites, this report will tell you which keywords people are searching for before they reach your site. Most common business titles and people’s names will be the most common keywords searched before finding your site, so search for industry or geographic specific keywords to get an idea of how well your search engine visibility and reach is.
Top 3 Reports to Review Each Month
Top Exit Pages (content)
This report will tell you the pages that have the highest amount of exits on your website, meaning a person hit the “Services” page and left the site entirely. This report, along with others, will help shape your visitor profile and allow to understand which pages need to be optimized through content and/or graphics. Pages that either lose the visitor or interrupt the conversion process need to be identified immediately .
New vs. Returning
Always good to know who is returning to your site and who are new visitors. Certain website will be focusing on the percentage of Returning visitors, while others (with one conversion process) will be looking for increasing the amount of New visitors. Before reviewing this report, identify whether it is more beneficial to have more, new visitors to your website or more, returning and educated visitors.
Avg. Time on Site
This is a good indication of how much someone enjoys being on your site. This will tell you the average time spent on your site. A minimum requirement to shoot for is 1 minute or 60 seconds for any website. With a 8-10 second attention span for the homepage, you will have some outliers for this report, so it is key to look at the Average over a length of time. If you site takes several pages and clicks to convert, you should time the experience and then base your targeted average on that experience. Example: it takes 6 clicks and 55 seconds to reach the Product X page where I requested a white paper for further information.
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