A small business website can measure success in numerous ways, but probably the most common is traffic. Everyone wants traffic. The more traffic you have the better, correct? I disagree. I would rather get 100 visitors to my site that are strongly interested in my services vs. getting 1000 visitors that really do not care.  Targeted traffic is what you want.

How do you know you are getting targeted traffic? Website analytics.  Many small business owners really have no clue about what sort of traffic they are getting or even how to figure out what the numbers mean.  This post is meant to be a quick introduction to website analytics.

Most web hosting packages you will come with some sort of statistics. There are also programs or services you can purchase.  Probably the best free option right now is Google Analytics.   When looking at a web analytics program/service, you need to be able to answer the following questions:

* Who has been to your website?
* What were they looking for?
* Where did they come from?
* How long did they look at your content?
* Were they locals?

To answer some of these questions, you will need to understand the terms used in web analytics.  For a good list of terms used in analyics, please see Wikipedia .  Below are two terms that I try to point out to folks because they very important.

Visitor / Unique Visitor / Unique User – The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server or viewing pages within a defined time period. A Unique Visitor counts once within the timescale. A visitor can make multiple visits. Identification is made to the visitor’s computer, not the person, usually via cookie and/or IP+User Agent. Thus the same person visiting from two different computers will count as two Unique Visitors.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of visits where the visitor enters and exits at the same page without visiting any other pages on the site in between.

The last point I want to make about web analytics is time.   Time will show trends and this is very valuable when understanding your traffic.  If your website is new, or you recently updated portions of the site, you will need to give it some time to see how that will effect your traffic. The more data points you get, the better informed you will be.

I want to encourage all small business owners to take a few minutes and take a look at your traffic. Can you figure out what is going on with your site?  It is not that hard, once you understand the basics.

Additional Articles:
Below are some excellent articles, written by fellow local search marketers about how analytics can help with your local search marketing campaigns.

• The Most Important Analytics In Local Search
• Using Analytics For Local Search Optimization
• Tracking Local search Traffic with Analytics

Larry Sullivan is a well known local search marketing expert. Larry provides online marketing assistance to small business across the country. He also runs a popular local search blog at Local Biz Bits. Email this author | See all posts by Larry Sullivan

Tags | Bounce rate, google, Google Analytics, marketing, traffic, Unique Visitor, Web analytics