The Importance of Web Analytics

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One of the most important features and pieces of information you can get from having a website as a financial advisor, is access to website statistics and analytics. Ultimately, this information should provide you with a very good idea of how your websites visitors are using your website, how may visitors you are getting and ultimately you can determine whether you are generating good exposure and value from your web presence or if there is room for improvement.

The statistical information gathered from your website can be overwhelming and very technical in nature so if you are a tech savvy financial advisor, this is good news, but if you are not, you only need to pay attention to a few pieces of data that will be beneficial to you. This includes:

• Visitors – should give you an idea of how many different individuals visited your website. The more the better.

• Page Views – how many pages of content have been viewed by your visitors. Higher page views may indicate the level of interaction your visitors have with your website. Ultimately you want them to end up on a goal page like your contact page or any form that can be filled out.

• Top Pages – gives you an idea of which pages on your site are most popular. For many advisor websites we have found that the most popular pages include biography pages (many consumers will now do on-line research about the product or service they are about to buy).

• Timeline – Should give you an idea how your website is performing over time. A popular approach is to see the activity over one month and then you can compare month to month.

• Search term - the terms your visitors are using in search engines such as Google or Yahoo to get to your site.

• Referring sites – indicate any sites linking to your website and that bring traffic. Common referring sites include Search Engines (like Google and Yahoo), Social Networking sites (like LinkedIn.com and Facebook.com), Client sites, Directories etc…