The hub of the marketing wheel today is your web site. A lot of energy and marketing dollars are cast to the building, maintaining, and promoting of web sites. We get a lot of questions about social media. When you are using social media correctly, it is, in its many forms, an important marketing tool, but not nearly as important as your web site.

So how do you know when your web site is being effective or ineffective as a marketing tool? If you have looked at your analytics reports, you can get lost in all the charts and graphs. Are some stats more important than others? Yes! Here is what you should be looking at on a regular basis.

Visits

Visits - or "Users” - to your site represent the number of people who have opened your web site. You should get an overview of how many people are visiting your site each month, but you should also take a look at the number of people who open each page. The number of Visits/Users is the most important stat you can glean from your analytics report. It is always the goal of any marketing to get in front of people. If this stat is low, you are not engaging your target market and you need to do something different.

Pageviews

How many pages did the visitors look at when they browsed to your site? A lot of that may have to do with the composition of your site. You may not have a web site with a lot of pages, so your Pageviews compared to your Visitor/Users may look different than a web site that has a myriad of pages to click and open. However, your Pageviews should be a very robust number if you are marketing effectively. If you see it wane, again, do something different. It is a red flag.

There are a couple of other stats you should consider when you look at Pageview stats. One is the average time spent on your site per visit. Once again, this will vary based upon the content of your site, but there are some general benchmarks regarding average time spent on web sites. If you are marketing effectively, that number should be around 2 minutes.

The other stat you want to compare to your Pageviews is the Bounce Rate. A bounce is when someone browses to only one page of your web site and then leaves. Make sure you are comparing individual pages to your bounce rate. There are some web pages we have built for customers that don’t require any further action. For instance, if you have an app where your customers can quickly get pertinent information, I would expect a high bounce rate. In that case, you are marketing effectively when the customer doesn’t have to search all over your web site for what they are looking for. For other marketing campaigns, I might have a call to action that requires the customer to click to another page. In that case, a high bounce rate would indicate we are not being effective.

Entry and Exit Pages

The other stats that should catch your attention are the Entry and Exit pages. This is the first and last page a visitor to your site browses on your site. Compare these stats to your marketing efforts to engage the customer. In the case of Entry Pages, is this where you have directed your call to action on other marketing mediums? In the case of Exit Pages, is this what you ultimately want them to see on your website? The assumption with the last page viewed is the customer has found what they are looking for. These are the most important pages on your web site. Do these stats line up with your marketing plans? If so, congratulations! You are marketing effectively. If not, it’s time to make some changes.

You can learn a lot from examining some key analytics on a monthly basis. Consider them an indicator of the health of your web site as a marketing tool.