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Knowing which site stats to focus on and those to ignore, analytics is key to really knowing what changes to make for increased conversions. By setting realistic goals you can determine whether or not you are achieving them. Analytics should be the basis of building your online campaigns to obtain better results and growing your business.

Improving site performance is integral to raising the bar on your entire online marketing gameplan. If you don’t know who you are addressing, what they need and how and why their requirements and site behaviour might change at each visit, then you will not succeed in driving sales.

Carefully constructing your next email marketing campaign, newsletter mailout, regular blog, article or other online content must be based on actual – but crucially – relevant knowledge of your customer, present and future!

Set realistic site goals – specify how many conversions you want per week or month by monitoring your past and present site analytics and stats. Then, if you aren’t meeting this goal, find out why users aren’t converting by studying your ‘conversion funnel’ – the track a consumer takes while visiting a website. Regarding eCommerce sites, minor adjustments are often, all you need to guide users to the ‘submit order’ button.

B2B service sites, would gain considerably from including a sign-up or registration form and not necessarily an order form. If conversions are low, have the functionality checked- it could likely be the site user interface.

Distinguish hits, visits, and conversions – myths abound on many brands, which boast the numbers of ‘hits’ or ‘visits a site racks up. But these figures say nothing about the end-result!

• Hits – are a server request for an item on a specific webpage (e.g., image, animation, download). When a browser opens a page in your site, you can get many hits, but they do not translate into traffic or conversions.

• Visits – a user landing on a page in your site or navigating to other pages before leaving, which counts as one visit. This is useful because you know how many visitors go to your site and how many items were requested by the server from each page. The ‘new visitors’ and ‘returning visitors’ stats help you analyse the figures for new business you are attracting and can be compared to repeat customers.

• Conversions – the number of visitors to your site who completed a pre-defined goal or action (such as a purchase, download, or registration). This is your most important statistic!

Monitor page views and dwell time – the number of page views a consumer made during a visit and the time spent on those pages. Heatmaps will graphically track behaviour whilst analytics will tell you which pages are more popular and which need their content worked upon to raise viewing figures and time on the page.

The key is always to keep your eye firmly focused on the main goal, i.e. converting more visitors into a captive returning audience and increasing sales. Frequency and consistency are essential. Refresh your website design with regular original content and image changes and watch the renewed interest steadily grow to the desired result on your analytics.