First and foremost, you’ve got to have the tools for the job. We’ve touched on this before, but repetition, as they say, is part of remembering, so we’re going to shine the spotlight here again: You are going to want Google Analytics. Now, let’s be fair. Google Analytics is the grand daddy of them all, but the corollary to this rule is You Want Some Sort of Tracking Program.

If you decide on Google Analytics, that’s great. If you’re a Piwik guy, a Chartbeat gal, a Mint man, or any combination thereof of the existing alternatives to Analytics, you’re also fine. The main point is we want to make sure we’re tracking what is happening to the site. You’re also going to want to get familiar with the terminology. If words like “Click Through Rate” or “Bounce Rate” sounds like gibberish, and their corresponding acronyms “CTR” or “BR” are also like Greek to you, you’re going to want to fix that.

Without familiarity with your program, the results that you’re seeing are widely irrelevant. If you’re sorting through gibberish, it could be the best information in the world, but it wouldn’t mean anything. As a quick cheat sheet, here are two terms to remember:

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): CTR is used as a measurement of the success of your marketing campaign. In simple terms, if you have an add that is posted in 100 places, and 25 people actually click on the link and go through, you have a 25% click through rate. But this is a bit of an oversimplification, as this applies primarily to banners you have “out there” in cyberspace.

A more accurate description of CTR would be “number of clicks” divided by “number of impressions”. An “impression” is simply a single appearance of an advertisement appearing on a web page.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is a term used to describe the trend of a person visiting your site, with the intention of tracking where it is that people are ‘bouncing’, or leaving the site. The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page divided by the Total Number of Visits.

But all of this is just information if we do nothing with it. The second aspect of properly watching your site lies in recording. This may sound like an obvious statement, but it is very easy to ‘not remember’ to track down your latest change, or this day’s or this week’s report. It is in recording that the most amount of self-discipline is required, and can in fact be one of the most difficult parts of managing your website.

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