Fueling an Addiction, Or How to Become a Web Traffic Tracking Master

I must start this post with a confession: I’m addicted to Google Analytics. My husband constantly teases me about “checking my stats.” And it’s true, a day hardly goes by that I haven’t looked at my analytics data at least once…usually more than that.

But, I’m here to tell you there’s hope. The hope is that all this data tracking is actually useful (so I explain to Jay), and it helps me grow my business. If you’re a photographer (or frankly any business owner with a heavy online presence) and you’re not using Google Analytics or some similar web traffic tracking device (try saying that 5 times very quickly), you’re really doing yourself a disservice.

Tools like Google Analytics help you do several things; primarily they help you answer questions like: How do I know the advertising I’ve paid for on theKnot.com, weddingwire, etc. is working for me? How do people find my business in the first place? Are people navigating my website successfully? Is my target audience finding me? What can I change on my website to improve its traffic?

So, the first advice is this–go sign up for Google Analytics and follow the instructions to install the tracking code on your website and/or blog. Next, learn how to use the data! Here’s some tips to get you started:

When you first login, you’ll go to your dashboard page, which normally gives you a month’s worth of data and shows the number of visits, where they’ve come from, etc. This is data for my blog for the last month.

In the far left-hand corner you’ll see different sets of data you can look at: Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, and Goals (if you’ve made them). Clicking on the Traffic Sources gives you more specific info. In the last month, I’ve had 2,992 visits to my blog, the majority of those coming from “Referring Sites”. A referring site would be any other website that links to your site and through which visitors land on it. One of my biggest referring sites for my blog is actually my photography website. Many people come to my website just to click to my blog.

Now looking at my main website data (you need a different tracking code for each website), I can see that over the course of 2 years (see the calendar in the right-hand corner) I’ve had visitors from every U.S. state. Awesome. Most visits, obviously, are from Pennsylvania, which would make sense for me being a Pittsburgh wedding photographer. But look! 13 lucky people from Nevada have found my site. So now you can verify your target audience (geographically) is finding you.

I can also see just how much my web traffic grew last year and other such trends.

If you want to see data from a specific time, just click on the calendar in the right-hand corner and select your dates.

Now, how do you know if your online advertising is working? Well, say you are advertising on theKnot.com, a well-known and much visited website. You want to know if people are actually clicking from your listing to your website. You’ll find that data under “Referring Sites.” Here’s a look at when I was advertising last year on theKnot. I picked one day-Monday, September 28th to look at. If you squint, you should be able to see that the second to the last referring site was from theKnot. In fact, I only had one visit, they looked at 8 pages, spent 3 minutes and 38 seconds on my site, and it was was their first time to visit my website.

That data tells me several things–one is that the visitor was really interested in looking at my work–after all, they spent several minutes on my site! So, that’s a plus for theKnot–they’re sending me qualified leads. But, it also tells me something by what is not there–more visits! At that point in time, I had featured vendor status and was at the top of the photography page. It was also a Monday, a popular day for brides to work on their wedding plans, and yet I only had one visit. Several things could have been at work here–maybe I need to update my description on theKnot to draw more interested parties…or maybe the featured vendor status is overpriced. These are the sort of things you need to be looking at when you’re paying for advertising.

The last step, of course, in evaluating your marketing campaign is verifying how each prospective client found you. I ask this question on my contact page (which I need to update!). You may get 20 hits from theKnot, but at the end of the day, if no one selects you to be their photographer, something is wrong.

Again, clues may be found in the data. When you look at the Content data, you can see what pages people are looking at and how long they’re spending on them. Are people actually looking at your portfolio page? Can they find your pricing page? The data will reveal all! I had 11 page views on my pricing page yesterday and people spent an average of 2+ minutes reading it.

Maybe you’ll see you have a really high “bounce rate” for your website. A “bounce” means the person clicked to your site and then pretty much immediately left. This could be for many reasons–one they realized they didn’t mean to come to your site and only accidentally clicked to it. Or another more telling one is perhaps your site has music, and the visitor clicks to your website while they’re at work. They don’t want your website music blasting all over the office, so instead of trying to find the button to turn it off, they just move on to the next photographer’s website. Or lastly, maybe they’re on a rinky dink computer that doesn’t have the latest flash version installed. They can’t actually see any of your pretty pictures… Check your data.

Most visitors yesterday had the latest versions of Flash installed on their computers. Woohoo! They can see my pretty photos.

OK, so hopefully now you’ve seen just how important it is to track your website stats…there’s really so much more you can do with Google Analytics, but I don’t want to bore anyone! I know I’m a bit obsessed… But do yourself and you business a favor and start tracking!