Analyze this was a great movie with Robert De Niro playing one of his funniest roles. The movie was called Analyse because of Robert De Niro’s shrink that had to analyze and sort out his problems.  If you watched the movie you’ll see that that didn’t really happen.

How about your website? Have you done any analysis on performance and have you made some improvements?  How many of you have not looked at your website traffic and done some investigation work?  Here are some tips that will help you improve the performance of your website.

1. Use a good analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Statcounter.

2. Set up your analytics tool to deliver you a daily reports showing a summary of the traffic on your website.  How many people came to your website, what’s the difference over yesterday, what sites did they come from, what keywords did they use.  This is all valuable and interesting information.

3. At the end of each week fill out an excel spreadsheet that monitors the vital signs of your website.  What’s the traffic compared to last week,  are you getting more leads or less leads?  If you were running a shop would you keep an eye on how many people came in during the week?  How many people left happy?  What was their average spend?  Consider your website is your shop, what are you going to monitor.

4. Read a couple of good books or follow a couple of good bloggers on analytics. You can follow Google’s analytics blog to find out all the latest changes or  follow Avinash Kaushik for the advanced user!

5.  Check out your bounce rate.  A bounce rate measure lets you know what percentage of people came to a page on your site and left before going to another page.  If you’ve got a high bounce rate on a page you need to check if this page needs to be updated and improved.  @seamusbyrne sent out a link to-day about an article with more detials on bounce rate.

6. Check out the average time people are spending on your site. If they are not spending long on your site is your content not that good?  How about improving it, making it more interesting and engaging would that help?

7.  While you’re at it you should also check to see how quick your website is.  Use websiteoptimization.com which is a free tool.  If your site is very slow nobody is going to stay around too long!

Have you any tips to add?

Ian Cleary