If you have Google Analytics already installed on your website, congratulations! You picked a great tool to help analyze your website traffic. Google analytics is a very robust free service that provides detailed statistics about your website visitors. (If you don't have Google Analytics installed, get it!)

When first logging into your account you may seem somewhat overwhelmed with the amount of data available–don’t be!

Here is an overview of some key Google Analytics metrics to help get you started:

Your Dashboard – Your dashboard displays a summary of your past month’s traffic. It can help you gauge general traffic patterns and also highlight key spikes in traffic.

Site Usage – One of the most important statistics to pay attention to in this section is your Bounce Rate–the percentage of people that visited your website and left after viewing only one page. For staffing firms we have found an average bounce rate of roughly 30-35%. If your bounce rate is higher than this, you may need to consider a different page layout, more simple navigation,or adding more compelling content.

Traffic Sources – This section details the three ways people can get to your website:

- Direct Traffic shows the number of people who typed your website address directly into their browser.

- Search Engines includes everyone that found your website through Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. The keywords people typed into the Search Engine to find your site are also captured. Examining this data can help you determine if Search Engine Optimization is needed (for more detailed information download our free Staffing and Recruiting SEO Guide).

- Referring Sites shows the number of people that arrived at your site by clicking on a link on a different website. This can be extremely helpful when evaluating the value of job board listings and online advertising.

By starting with these three main areas, you will gain a very good understanding of how your website is performing. You can then use this information to make adjustments to your website, test changes, determine how other marketing activities are performing and improve the number of qualified leads coming from your website.

If you would like to discuss more in-depth reporting capabilities (like creating specific goals and tracking conversion rates), please feel free to contact me at 888-696-2900 or bsmith@haleymarketing.com.