You’ve heard that you should start tracking your website’s analytics. After some confusing steps to add a tracking code to your website, you head to the dashboard only to find that it’s incredibly confusing.

There is so much data that it can be overwhelming at first. You want to track more than the chart that shows you how many visitors to your site per day. While it’s nice to see visitors, you want to know about unique visitors, how long people stay on your site and where these visitors originate.

Unique Users

When you visit the dashboard of Google Analytics for your website, you’ll see a list of menus on the left side. One of the most important things you’ll want to track if you’re trying to grow your visitors is under Audience. Under Audience, you’ll want to hit Overview to see two choices; Sessions and Users.

The visitors to your site are broken down into two categories. One is new visitors to the site, which is the Users category. Repeat visitors are listed under Sessions. New visitors to your site are considered unique users, and if you’re trying to grow your traffic, that’s the number you want to track.

Unique users is extremely important for your business. You want your unique user count to be high. This means new potential clients are looking at your website. This metric is huge when trying to determine how many new eyes you’re bringing in every week/month/year. The more unique users, the more potential leads.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a measure of visitors leaving your website after looking at a page. Much like the other metrics the information gathered here is very subjective. A low bounce rate means that people are staying on your site for a long time, whereas a high bounce rate means that someone spends a short time on a page before clicking off of the site.

Normally you could look at a high bounce rate as a bad thing. But that isn’t always the case, when looking at your bounce rate you should also take the time on site into consideration. A high time on site, with high bounce rate, could signify that all the information a visitor needed was on one page.

However a low time on site with high bounce rate could signify that the information a visitor was looking for was either hard to find, or non-existent.

To be a successful home inspector your goal should be to have a high time on site, and a high bounce rate. This will mean that you laid out all the pertinent information for the potential customer, in one convenient place.

Traffic Sources

If you’re considering whether to put your time into more social media engagement or linking to a certain site, you can analyze the source of your traffic currently through Acquisition. You can see how your keywords are working through Organic Search.

The links and sharing you are doing currently can be seen through Direct Traffic as well as the amount of traffic coming from ads. The channels page provides more detail about where the traffic originates.

Traffic sources combined with the amount of leads you get can be invaluable. If you know where all your leads are coming from, you know exactly where to focus your efforts. Work smarter, not harder.

Time on Site

The time a visitor spends on your website can be a very telling figure, you can determine whether or not your website is working. This is a very important tool to make sure what you’re doing is working.

For a home inspector low time on your site doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem with your website. That’s when you have to start looking at not only how long someone is on your site, but where they’re spending their time.

Pages

Another metric that you should track faithfully is the viewed pages. This will give you the most popular pages on your site. This can be useful for finding the least popular pages on your site too. When you see your most popular pages, you can easily determine what is working and what isn’t.

Pages are extremely important to determine if a visitor is looking at your associations, services, certifications, report examples, etc. You can then use this information to determine what a potential lead is looking for on your website, which can be invaluable information.

Keywords

The keywords you use in your home inspector business are ones that bring visitors to your site where they will skim your content and hire you for their home inspection. The traffic should reflect the keywords that you’ve chosen, and if they don’t, you should tweak your approach to gain visitors through keywords.

Keywords can also show you what people are searching in order to find you. This can tell you whether they’re looking for you by name, zip code, price, etc. You can then use that information to tailor you website to suit the methods people are finding you.

While you might not use all of the analytics that Google has to offer, these should be your top priority since as using all the information they provide will help you gain potential leads. These metrics will help you with decisions regarding how you market your services

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