Executive Summary
Put the information to use. Formulate a goal — for example, encourage visitors to stay longer by increasing overall site stickiness. Benchmark your statistics, implement your change, and compare traffic over a given period.
The Feedback Process
- Study your statistics.
- Formulate a strategy.
- Implement your change.
- Measure the effects of your change.
- Start again at step 1.
The process is ongoing and continuous. This is not a one-time exercise — it's a discipline that the best digital businesses apply every single day.
General Introduction: Making Decisions Based on Stats
Understanding website traffic and visitor behaviour is crucial to any goal-oriented or business website. Manage your website and make well-informed daily decisions based on the knowledge of who's visiting and what they are doing. Without this knowledge, your best ideas are based on guesswork. Your data and statistics need to provide what is called 'actionable insight' — information you can use to make management decisions and take action.
Getting Traffic to Your Site
Statistics tell you where your traffic is coming from — which search engines, which referring sites, which campaigns. Use this to double down on the channels that are working and cut the ones that aren't. Don't spend money on a traffic source you can't measure.
Converting Traffic: Desired Outcomes
Getting traffic is only half the battle. Your stats should tell you what percentage of visitors achieve a goal on your site — whether that's a purchase, a sign-up, a download, or a contact form submission. The conversion rate is the single most important metric for most businesses.
Act on Your Stats: Examine and Improve Flow
Look at the paths visitors take through your site. Where do they enter? Where do they exit? What pages do they visit before converting? This flow analysis reveals the bottlenecks and drop-off points where you are losing potential customers. Fix the flow and your conversion rate goes up — without spending a cent more on traffic.
Conclusion
Statistics are only as valuable as the decisions they inform. Commit to the feedback loop, act on what you find, and your website will continuously improve. Opentracker gives you the real-time, visitor-level data you need to close the loop between insight and action.