Blog Of A Boston Web Designer.

The best teams in your Fantasy Football League have a range of analytical skills, see opportunities/weaknesses with their team and others, and react accordingly. They understand player stats to form a complete team with the best available talent. They are able to find the diamonds in the rough and continue on when players get injured. They even know when to cut players for a better piece to the puzzle. They understand their team better than the others and make changes week to week because of different matchups. They are constantly involved with their team and it shows.

Set It & Forget It Doesn’t Fly.
I see it happen all the time. Clients get setup with Google Analytics on their website and never leverage the information tracked. Though some may view the scheduled reports, rarely any ever read the tea leaves to take action. I also see many websites without any visitor tracking (if this is you, get Google Analytics installed, you’ll be surprised with the information you can gather) and are missing out big time.

Don’t Just View Analytics, Use Analytics.
The amount of information gathered from Google Analytics will surprise you. Here is some information that can be gathered from someone visiting your website.

• Length of visit
• Amout of pages visited
• Amount of visitors
• Keywords used to find your website
• Websites that sent a visitor to your website
• Screen size of visitor
• Bounce rate (if they came to a page and didn’t stay)
• Top pages visited
• Type of computer and browser used by visitor

I’m sure you are all saying well that’s great but how can any of this help me improve my website. OK, well here are a few examples that can get your mind thinking.

1) You notice an increase in mobile phone users on your website trying to read your articles and contact information. You can create a simplified mobile version to help them get to the information quicker. Maybe even deliver coupons if they are within 15 miles from your store by utilizing the GPS in their mobile phone.

2) You notice a page on your website is getting many visits but nobody is staying on the page to read it (this equals a high bounce rate). This should tell you that the content written on that page is not what your visitors are looking for and you should change this page to keep visitors on your website.

3) You notice a big drop in Search Engines leading to your website. You need to figure out why this happened and fix it. You may have lost prime position in Google because of a change in Googles algorithm. Or, a competitor may have entered and surpassed your ranking.

4) You want to include a new cutting edge feature on your website. You notice that 60% of your users are still stuck on Internet Explorer 6 and your web designer informs you that the new feature will not work for those users. You can now make an informed decision whether or not to develop that new feature knowing 60% of your users cannot use it.

So, if you’ve got Google Analytics on your website and you’re just viewing the scheduled reports, consider this a push to really dive in and understand what is going on with your website and begin to mold it into the best website possible. Find your opportunities and fix your weaknesses!