After running a web based business for over 15 years, I have found little to help the small business that is really accountable.
There are no end of cold calls, offering all sort so web services, most probably of dubious value, so how do you know who to trust?
Analytics is one way, but it has many limitations for the small business. Low traffic volumes make it difficult to see trends, or you have to wait so long to accumulate meaningful data that the trend you looked at has itself changed.
So I looked at it some more, played around with the data and came up with some ideas.
#1
Clicks or sessions are what most of us want from a website, but we want sessions that convert to sales, phone calls etc
So I looked at ways of gauging the quality of the traffic, generally the longer someone stays on your site, the more pages they browse, the more likely they are to be the sort of people you want.
So I devised an algorithm to do just that!
#2
Every site is different, a one page site, by definition, will have a 100% bounce rate, normally not considered a good thing. However, it might so completely answer a searchers enquiry as to justify the website's purpose.
So I factored in that as every site is different, my quality algorithm must be relative to your particular site, so it uses past data as a short of benchmark, against which progress can be measured.
#3
Websites get traffic through a number of channels. In most cases the best quality traffic is organic, assuming your site gets enough. This is the channel that relates closest to your site's appeal to your core prospective market.
Comparing ad based traffic against this yardstick is a good way of estimating if your ads are focussed enough. If paid prospects are bouncing out of your site, you probably need to focus your ads more to get better value.
There are many more ways the internet works and it's always changing. Watching your analytics is a good way to keep abreast of things. With this service I hope reading your analytics becomes easier and more of a regular routine. Like many things there is always something new, something more to learn.