In this lesson, we’ll discuss traffic, why it’s important and what can affect it, some important performance metrics to understand, and tools for measurement.
First, though, you need to understand that website data and tracking is more than just determining if are you getting high clicks, impressions, and ranking in search engines. That’s part of it, but it’s also understanding what your target audience is doing on your website and then tweaking your copy, your call to actions, your menu structure, or in your menu style to make those visitors more comfortable when they come to your website
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Sarah: There are three main ways that people are going to arrive at your website. One is direct traffic. They are just typing in your domain name into their search engine and going straight there. The other one is social media. So they follow you one of your social media accounts. These are your loyal followers. They’ve already bought into everything that you’ve done and they keep an eye on all of your new content. So they are going to keep engaging through your social media accounts. The third is brand new search engine traffic people who are going on to Google and looking for an answer to their question that your website happens to answer.
David: And so website data and tracking are some really important topics that we broke up into a couple of different sections because there’s just so much information there. But the most important thing to think about now is you’re going to use this information to make a determination about your content and who your audience is, what percentage of your audience is coming from search or from social media, what percentage of your audience comes to your website and leaves right away. Did they find the right information, have they found an article that’s interesting, as part of your business and growing your blog you want to start to think about your expertise and your trust with your users and in order to display sort of your own authority on your blog post. You need to know are people staying there? Are they reading your content? Have they read the entire page or are they scrolling down past a certain point and leaving? Are your ads something that are causing them to click off the website and not stay engaged with your main content? So website data and tracking is more than just determining are you getting good conversion with Google search. It’s that plus it is understanding what your audience is doing on your website and really making micro adjustments on your writing style or in your call to actions or in your menu system to make those visitors more comfortable on your website.