News & Events

How & Why You Should Analyze Your Website

It’s December and the year is coming to a close. You’re beginning to think about 2018, but before you start planning for the new year, take some time to look back at how your internet marketing efforts performed.

Perhaps you revised your website and have been reasonably posting new content to your blog, but the feedback has been restricted to casual comments from clients or colleagues. You need to take some time to jump into the world of Google Analytics, a free and useful tool that can give you answers to questions such as:

How many people visit my website?
Who are my readers?
Do they take action or convert?
How long do they stay?

Go to Google Analytics and click on the sign in button in the top right-hand corner. Once you've signed in, follow the directions to set up Analytics on your web page.

Goal Conversion Pages

If you want to narrow results, you can set up goals for your traffic statistics. To set this up for your website, open up Analytics and click on Conversions > Goals > Overview. Goals allows you to decide which actions you value the most—whether it’s time spent on a page, how visitors found you, or if they landed on a particular page of your website. For example, you could set up a thank you page for a contact form submission. Once established, Google will track how many visitors completed the form, giving you the number of visitors who took action or the conversion rate.

Bounce Rate

To judge the effectiveness of your site, you’ll want to know how many visitors stop by and how long they stay. The overview report will tell you the number of visitors. This statistic, called bounce rate, tells you the percentage of people who leave your site after seeing one page.

For example, if your bounce rate is 75%, it means that three quarters of your visitors leave after one page. A bounce rate of 50% or less is considered good. If your rate is 50% to 70%, your site could use some revising. There is a statistic for session duration telling how long visitors stayed on the site. If there is a high bounce rate, but visitors are staying for more than 10 seconds, then maybe a little updating will do the job.

Who are your readers?

To find an overview of your audience, click on Audience where you can discover the country, city of origin, language spoken, age, gender, and interests of your visitors. If the audience depicted is not the audience you want to attract, it may be time to revise your website. Perhaps the content you are providing is not of interest to your desired reader. A little thought about your clients' legal concerns and the questions they may ask could point you in the right direction.

The amount of information available from Google Analytics is extensive. Decide what is important to you to help set up your marketing goals in 2018.

Roberta Gubbins has served as the editor of the Ingham County Legal News. Since leaving the paper, she provides services as a ghostwriter editing articles, blogs, and e-blasts for lawyers and law firms. She is the editor of The Mentor, SBM Master Lawyers Section newsletter.

Using the New Enhanced Member Directory

How to Login and Edit Your Profile
Zeekbeek For Lawyers Page—learn about all the new directory features
How to Contact ZeekBeek Support