You do everything right. You’ve got a great looking website tailored to your trade. You focus on a manageable set of relevant keywords. You publish quality content, and you pay attention to every detail. But how do you know if all your hard work is paying off? Google Analytics is a great tool which might help answer that question. Google Analytics is free service offered by Google which provides detailed statistics about the people who visit your website. It can tell things like how many people have been to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they viewed most, and even how often the same person returned. You never have to wonder about how your well you site is doing. You have all the answers!
The problem is that analytics can be confusing at times. Google provides hundreds of different metrics for you to explore, but how are you supposed to know what they all mean? The DSS Dev team has come to the rescue! We want to help unclutter information, so that you know how your content is doing in real time. If you edit any piece of content in DSS, you will notice a new box at the top of the page that wasn’t there before. Here we have gathered the five most important things you should pay attention to. I want to talk about three of them here.
1. Visits
The visits metric is a count of how many people found a page on your website and then proceeded to look at a few more. For example, someone might find one of your library articles through a Google search. After reading the article, they might click on Practice Areas in your navigation bar. Because they’ve visited multiple pages on your site, they count as a visit. If someone comes and only reads a single page, that doesn’t count.
2. Pages per Visit
This is another very important statistic. This is the average number of pages a person views during a visit. You don’t want a person to find your website and then leave after reading just one page! The more pages a person views in a single visit, the more likely they are to convert into leads.
3. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of people who found a page of your website but left without clicking on anything else. Good content not only brings visitors, but it keeps them on the site. The more pages a person looks at on your site, the more trust you build as an authority on the matter. You want to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, but something between 60%-70% is generally pretty good.
Of course, these are only a few of the different ways you can tell how your site is doing. On your DSS Dashboard and on top of every content page, you will find five of the most important things to keep in mind. If you’re every confused about what they mean, just hover your mouse over their name for a quick reminder. I hope this gave you a helpful glimpse into the tools we’re adding to DSS. We plan to do a lot more with analytics in the near future. We want you to always know how well your site is doing!
