The World Wide Web has over 1 billion websites and it’s imaginably tough, tedious and challenging to do a website research in such an ocean of websites. Thankfully with some key analytics, tools and heuristic evaluations in place finding out almost everything you are interested in becomes possible. There are many factors at play when we discuss web analytics and hence there are multiple available options for a hawk-eye view over these factors. The page ranks, Alexa, views and demographic distribution, age, traffic, trend and almost all aspects which sum up in determining a website’s worth can today be easily found out. We put forward five best analytics to use for a website research.
#1 Website Visitors and page views
No matter how good the content of a website is, if it fails to attract more visitors and get more page views it will merely be a non-existent entity in an enormous pool of websites. Mostly when a domain is sold a website admin has an option to get an easy overview of these statistics. As a regular user or someone who is simply interested in finding out more details, you can always make use of free to premium tools like google analytics or MOZ. There are n numbers of options available if you are willing to invest but most often free tools will serve your purpose.
#2 Successful conversions
If you have ever used an analytics tool you will understand what conversion means. To say it in layman language a conversion is but a successful measure of what your website was built for. If you have an online tutoring website a high conversion rate would mean a number of people registering for the course. Hence it takes back us to point number one which talks about a number of visitors and page views. While more visitors are always welcome and can help you earn if you know how to use Adsense but your primary aim for the website is something which depends on right visitors. This can be understood in terms of age, gender, sector and demographic location of the user and it inarguably brings a yet another analytics to be kept in mind which is page rank and Alexa.
#3 Page rank and Alexa
Page ranks and Alexa rankings as old as they still account for one of the best ways to research about a website. These web analytics basics give a very good idea about website popularity and if it matters to you as it should then you must know and inquire about it.
#4 User behaviour and flow
Having information about a number of active user sessions or the frequency of users who paid your website a visit is very vital in understanding the user behaviour. What’s more important is to know if the visitors are repeating ones or newer ones. How long they spend time on the website and which section of the website attracts them the most. What impact it has on revenue and in the conversion as mentioned in point number 2. How are these visitors landing to this website? Backlink profile is a crucial point to be considered here. It is typical of websites these days to redirect or provide an anchor text to attract visitors. What typical keyword which when searched for attracts most of the users to a website? Are the articles in website SEO-optimized?
#5 Spikes and high load scenarios
Placing this at fifth point certainly, doesn’t means it is of any less importance then above four analytics. In fact, for a successful business, it is quintessential for a website owner to understand the spikes and peak load scenarios. It would be unfortunate and a disgrace if a website crashes when a number of concurrent users logged in or paid a visit. Statistics and an estimation of these spikes must be examined and system sizing appropriately done. Analyzing this is hence an indispensable aspect of website research.
Naturally, these five analytics are most useful for any website research and with Google Analytics, MOZ, Google website optimizer, Chartbeat and so on with an endless list of Analytics tools it is very easy to understand web analytics basics and do a meaningful website research.
