Do you know how well your website is performing? Website statistics can let you know how many people visit your site and how they interact with it. Drilling down into your website stats can help you to identify problems with your website and give you the information you need to design a more effective online marketing strategy. Here are a few basic stats that you should start paying attention to.

Page Views

The page view metric in your website tracking software counts the number of pages that are viewed on your website. Every time a user opens a page, your page view count goes up by one. Note that this isn’t the same as the number of visitors to your site, as some users will view several pages in a single visit.

Unique Visitors

The number of unique visitors to your site is a stat to pay attention to. This stat lets you know how many people visited your site for the first time. Websites use files called cookies to identify people who have already visited your site, so most returning visitors aren’t counted in the number of unique visitors. Visitors who have turned off tracking may be registered as new when in fact they have visited before, but this metric generally give a good indication of how successful you are at reaching out to new potential clients.

Bounce Rate

It’s not enough to simply get potential clients to your website – visitors also need to spend enough time there to feasibly learn about your services. The bounce rate lets you know what percentage of your website visitors hit the back button or close the browser as soon as they load the page. If you notice that a page on your website has a very high bounce rate, that’s a clear sign it needs some attention. It could be that the page takes so long to load that visitors become tired of waiting.

Also, think about how visitors are finding that particular page – is it possible that the links that lead there don’t accurately describe the page’s contents? For example, if a link in your navigation with the title ‘Contact Us’ leads to a page with no contact information, it could engender a high bounce rate. Another possibility is that the content on the page isn’t engaging enough to make people want to find out more, so they leave as soon as the page loads.

Traffic Sources

It can be helpful to know how visitors found your website. That’s why Web analytics tools include statistics on traffic sources. These might include the following:

• • Direct Traffic: The percentage of visitors who type your URL directly into the address bar of their browser. These people may have heard about your service from a friend or offline advertisement.

• • Organic Search: Potential clients may find your website through a search engine. If you’re getting very little traffic from organic search, it could be a sign that you need help optimizing your website to push it higher in search results.

• • Paid Search or PPC: If you’re paying to advertise your website through Google or another ad network, this metric will show you how many visitors your campaign brings in.

• Referring Sites: Referral traffic comes from other websites which have posted a link to yours. It can include listing sites, or even your own social media pages.

By tracking the statistics listed here, you can learn more about how people interact with your website. You can then use this information to help you design a more user-friendly website, or to improve your marketing campaigns.