Our clients have heard me talk about the value of analytics on the web site, maybe ad nauseum, and particularly the end of year stats. I just want to provide a thumbnail of what we saw in 2021 for Analytics for our kesslerfreedman.com website that we are clearly using to make decisions going forward.
First of all, over 35% of our “page views” are actually blog posts on our site – content that is not part of the main navigation. It is Googled and promoted on social media, which is how most visitors find it. It is content that is unique on our site, meaning it isn’t replicated elsewhere on our site, so it is bringing in new visitors to us all the time. One of our blog posts contributed 17% of our entry traffic to the site in 2021. We clearly are going to continue blogging. However, the same blog post that contributed 17% in 2021 to our entry traffic was over 35% in 2020. It is starting to show its age. We have to continue blogging new content to bring in new traffic that is of value to us.
Our “home page” is our top visited page. That alone isn’t surprising, this is the case for almost every site. However, it also emphasizes that every pixel of your home page should be dedicated to the goals of your web site. It is your best chance to get visitors to dig deeper into your goals. Don’t waste it with fluff or imagery of little value. Everything on the home page should mean something.
Our Contact page increased in percentage of traffic in 2021. Why is that important? Because that’s our goal for the next stage for visitors after visiting our site – to contact us. We are leading visitors better to that page, but there is always work to be done on this phase. We will keep working on this.
Because of how we structure our blog posts, we know that for 2021, we’ve done better in attracting traffic to our site with our new blog posts than we’ve done the previous three years. We will have to continue doing this, or traffic will suffer. We can see how the blog posts of 2019-2020 have dropped off in visitation value this year. (2018 still proves to be a banner year for us.) The same probably will hold true for this year’s posts in 2022.
Our website has reached a more targeted population in 2021 than it has in previous years. We do business with organizations based in the United States. Last year, only 51% of our web traffic came from the United States. This year it is 60%. Most of the drop off is from our Canadian neighbors.
Mobile usage increased over 10% on our web site in the past year. This isn’t surprising, it is the way of the world. But for us, it is a little misleading, as a third of the increase came from a Chinese search engine called Baidu. Good to know we are findable there, but it doesn’t really help us. And it could be a source of the Chinese spam we so enjoy receiving.
Google is still the biggest driver of traffic to our website. But direct access – either entering our domain, using a bookmark, or clicking a link in an email – is far more effective for getting visitors to fulfill our goal of contacting us. It isn’t even close. As much noise as you hear about social media, the most effective is email, as long as it isn’t spam. It is a worthy goal for us to increase that.
