Website Analysis and Reporting

Like most things in business, your digital marketing activity requires monitoring and analysing on a regular basis. Otherwise, how do you know what is and isn’t working. There’s a very famous marketing quote by John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whilst that may have been true when it was written, technology has allowed us the opportunity to measure almost everything.

The most important thing is to understand what really matter, what are the KPIs that we should be looking at for your business? We often get asked to prepare reems of reports that never get read and give lots of data when what you most often need to know is:

How much traffic am I getting to my website
Is it the right traffic
What do people do when they get there
How many take action e.g. fill in a form, buy a product, pick up the phone

These are the key elements that any business should be spending their time understanding. The reason to analyse them? So that you can improve on a continuous basis, hold your current market position or identify areas that just aren’t working for you.

From our point of view there are a number of key areas that we analyse.

1. Traffic – are there any fluctuations in traffic numbers and if so why? Where is that traffic coming from and how are people finding your website in the first place.
2. Ranking – whilst the days of compiling a list of 10 keywords to ‘go after’ is long gone, there is some benefit in tracking some longer tailed keyphrases to give an overall feel of where things are.
3. Backlinks – we don’t do lots of spammy link building, but we do try and gain relevant and higher quality links for our clients and so of course this is something that we track.
4. Technical – we look at technical elements on the website, are there plugin updates that need to be done, has site speed fallen, what can we do to make the website even better?
5. On-Page – we review meta data, internal linking, conversion, call to actions and a whole host of other on-page elements.
6. Ads – if we are running paid ad’s for our clients then we of course analyse the performance and adjust and tweak consistently.
7. Market – looking at the competition and the industry market online.
8. Business – changes within the business itself so that we can adapt what we are doing accordingly