How to measure your success:
So you have a website, now what do you do? How do you know if people are really going to it, reading the articles and clicking on your posted links?
There are many website services that you can give you this information. Logically, the more extensive ones cost more money, but there are free sites out there that give you a look at valuable statistics about your webpage. A quick caution, the majority of the free traffic measuring services may not work for your specific website or may have a catch to them (ex: you need to put a site meter at the bottom of your webpage). I mainly use two services to track links and clicks- GoogleAnalytics and Bit.ly. If you want a more extensive list of websites that that track traffic to your website I would check out this article- http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/track-online-traffic/
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- Google Analytics
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- Bit.ly
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free service (can be upgraded) that gives you extensive information about the traffic to and from your website. (http://tinyurl.com/dnxg83)
I signed up my company’s homepage and got to see these statistics and more on a weekly basis:
- Page visits
- Page Views
- % of new visits
- Bounce rate
- Avg. time on site
- Top ten sites is your website referred*
- And much more
These stats are given to the user in numeric form as well as pie and line graphs.
*I found this to be a very helpful tool. This list will tell you which of your social networking sites is working the best or has the most interested followers. Are more people being referred to your home website through Twitter or Facebook? Google Analytics will give you these statistics on a weekly period.
Other useful facts from G.A. are you can see at what day and time you got the most visitors. A useful trick is finding the time of day when you see the most visitors to your site and post articles on your Twitter or Facebook account. For me, I found Thursday evenings receive a high volume, so I try and post then to catch the highest audience volume.
Bit.ly
This is a free url shortener, like Tinyurl.com, that counts how many people (and from what country they are from) have clicked on this link once you post it. (http://bit.ly/)
It is a great tool to see how many people are interested in a link you posted to your blog or Twitter account.
Another website I found to be interesting was:
Crazy Egg
(Not free) This service provides a Heat Map, along with information on who is clicking what links and shows spots on the website where people leave their mouse the longest.
Website Grader (http://twitter.grader.com/)
This website, by HubSpot allows you to plug in your Twitter and Facebook account and your companies website and gives it a grade. It basically compares you against your competitors/friends/followers. Take Twitter for example, it will compare how many people are following you, how many updates you post etc. and you”l receive a grade out of a 100. 80′s are normal, 90′s you are doing pretty well and if you are lucky enough to receive a 100 you’ll be only one of 70 in the entire world with this grade.
Having these stastics are vital when monitoring your website and social network pages. You could find yourself spending a lot of time working on and posting to a certain blog or website to find that no one is clicking on your links or staying very long on it, proving you are doing something wrong or are wasting your time on that site. If you find yourself getting a lot of positive response from one website you should continue devoting time and efforts into that website and try to cultivate new relationships out of it. Start conversing with people you find are clicking on your links, or even send them links directly via@ posts on Twitter. You could even host a discussion board about topics that have worked well in the past, like how You Measure the Activity on Their Website!
Great tips!