What should you actually look at in an analytics report?
Visitor count is the least useful number there is. Five measures that show whether your site is actually working.
Open analytics and you're met with dozens of charts, most of which don't help you. Here's what genuinely matters.
Why visitor count misleads
A site with 5,000 visitors a month and no enquiries is worse than one with 300 visitors that gets two quote requests a week.
Traffic is a means, not a result. Before celebrating a rise, look at where that traffic came from and what it did.
1. Traffic sources
Where are visitors coming from?
- Organic search — the most valuable source. If it's growing, SEO is working.
- Direct — people who know your address. A sign of brand awareness.
- Social — the effect of your campaigns.
- Referral — people arriving from other sites.
If you depend on a single source, you're exposed.
2. Most viewed pages
Which pages draw interest? If a different page leads than you expected, you may need to rethink what your visitor is looking for.
If one of your blog posts gets more traffic than the home page, expanding on that topic makes sense.
3. Landing pages
Which page do visitors arrive on? Most people don't come through the home page but through an internal one. Do those pages describe you properly, and is the way to contact you obvious?
4. Engagement time
How long do they stay? An average of 20 seconds on a long article means nobody is reading it — either the headline misleads or the content doesn't meet the expectation it set.
5. Conversions
This is the most important measure and its setup is most often skipped. Define what "success" means on your site:
- A contact form submission
- A click on the phone number
- A tap on the WhatsApp button
- A view of the pricing page
Define these as events in analytics and you'll see which page actually brings work.
Fifteen minutes a month
You don't need to open analytics daily. Once a month, set aside fifteen minutes and answer three questions:
- How is traffic compared with last month?
- Which page brings the most conversions?
- Is there a page I expected to perform that gets no traffic?
The answers to those three shape next month's content plan on their own.
One warning
Tools like analytics process visitor data. If you use them you need cookie consent and a privacy notice updated accordingly.
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- #measurement
- #seo
