The value in traffic analytics is enormous! 

This post may not do that enormity justice, but let’s take a quick stab at why you will definitely benefit from analyzing your traffic.

Here’s a list of the things I like to watch closely month over month:

• Bounce rate [the percentage of people that leave after one page view]
• Total page views
• Avg page views per day
• Avg page views per visitor [we're @ 5 nowadays, which is pretty good]
• Total unique new visitors
• Avg unique new visitors per day
• Return visitors
• Avg return visitors per day
• Referral websites [who's bring traffic to us]
• Most popular pages [anything popular we can expand on]
• Searches that bring us traffic

Benefits accruing directly from the analysis of our traffic includes:

Our bounce rate was above 70%, which means virtually everyone that found us was leaving. With a focus on sharing information and the development of trust, clearly we had to improve. We did some looking around, came up with some ideas we liked and decided to redesign. We chose a more democratic presentation of front and center content than solely blog posts. As you can see above, bouncing went down from 70+% to between 7 and 9%. Simultaneously, page views per visitor have increased 150%.

We had traffic, but no sign ups so we created the Business Bloggers’ Bible giveaway and more visible lead capture forms. Now we get tons of leads and our database keeps growing exponentially month over month.

We weren’t getting enough referral traffic from other sites so we began auto- feeding our content into various social networks. Now we see it coming in from places like Twitter, Realtown and Facebook every day.

And probably more I can’t recall… but I’m sure you get the picture.