Even if your marketing budget is small, there is no excuse for not measuring activity and engagement on your website.  There are many free tools available that allow one to track and measure how visitors interact and engage with your website.  Think of an analytics package as a business intelligence tool.  If you know what your visitors are doing on your website, how they found it and which key-phrases they use to find it, you can utilise that data to make strategic marketing decisions.  To get you started, below are a few points you can pay attention to:

Bounce rate

This indicates whether the page the visitor landed on meets their expectations or not.  A high bounce rate means visitors did not find what they were looking for immediately and they clicked away from the website.  Reduce your bounce rate by looking at which keywords visitors are using on search engines to find a specific page on your website.  Scrutinise the content of that specific page to determine if you could add more information to make it more relevant to your most popular search queries.

Exit points

An exit point is where a visitor left the website.  If there is a page with a high exit rate it could indicate that the information on the page is not sufficient, or that there are insufficient calls to action.

Goals and conversion

One of the main advantages of online media is that Return on Investment (ROI) can be more accurately measured than with traditional media.  Goals that have been allocated to your website can include a number of things like downloading a brochure or completing a sign-up process.  Once a visitor converts, they become either a potential lead or client, hence one can say the percentage of conversions on a website is an indicator of its success.

Finally, optimise your website by means of testing, tweaking and measuring.  The use of an analytics package on your website will give you an idea of users’ behaviour on your website and what they want to derive from it.  Successful websites analyse the data from their analytics package on an ongoing basis and tweak the website to improve users’ browsing experience.