My Suggested New Year's Resolution For You

People typically make personal resolutions around New Year's (diets, exercise, spend more time at home, finish renovating that boat), but I have a small but humble suggestion to make for your professional skills: learn a little something about how people arrive and behave at your website.

Everyone who reads this list is represented on the web in some way.  Maybe you're a commercial real estate broker who has an informational page on your website.  Maybe you fundraise for an nonprofit.  Maybe you direct policy for a trade association.  Or maybe you do corporate communications. 

Regardless, somewhere out there you have a webpage or an entire website that people are interested in.  There's three interesting things you can learn from any web analytics product that tracks how people use your webpage or website that would give you something useful to learn.  If you don't have a web analytics product that tracks user behavior on your website, go get (or have your techie get) Google Analytics on your website for you.

Here's what I think you should (and shouldn't) pay attention to if you're just starting out.  If you're already consuming web analytics, then I suggest for New Year's that you resolve to spend more time with your family.  :)

Your top search phrases:
These are the top search phrases people type into Google or Yahoo! that bring them to your website or webpage.  My personal blog has the follow top search phrases:

1. subway breakfast
2. ajax slider
3. chef'n pepper
4. cream of garlic soup

Though my blog is mostly about poker, I was surprised to see that a posting I wrote about how bad the breakfast sandwiches at Subway are was so popular.  What do I use this info for?  Though I'll never write any more about Subway breakfast sandwiches, I'll probably go and place an advertisement on that page, to take advantage of the traffic there.

Your top content pages:
These may correspond to your top search phrases, but it will tell you where your greatest website traffic is.  When you want to promote something, you should make sure that these pages have something on them that reflects your priority.

Your sources of traffic:
What percentage of your traffic comes from search engines?  From people directly typing in your URL?  For my professional blog, here are the statistics:

• 16.81% Direct Traffic
• 44.91% Referring Sites
• 38.27% Search Engines

This tells me useful information, that my efforts to get useful people to link to my website are yielding results.

What shouldn't you look at?
Pageviews are meaningless.  Visits are what you should pay attention to, and the average amount of pageviews per visit they consume.  But even checking visits on your website only tells you something that at the end of the day, isn't actionable.

Conclusion
You can learn a lot by understanding why people are looking at even just your biographical page online.  Take advantage of it.

If you find this all very mystifying, please call me.  I can help you make sense of your web analytics.

Disclosure: We don't work for Google Analytics or any competing web analytics product.