Tracking the success of your website project is an important aspect of the overall website management process. Having established your goals for the website from the start you will now be able to look at different metrics to see how well your website’s performance matches your initial objectives.

One simple way to to know what’s happening with your website is to have a feedback form that asks users for suggestions or comments in areas of concern to you. Running surveys on your website can also give you more detailed feedback that may be helpful in steering the future direction of your website.

Quite a few tools exist which you already have access to for free that can tell you even more detailed statistics about your visitors and how they interact with your site. Here are some of the tools that you can request as a part of your Managed Hosting and Maintenance plan with us:

• Google Analytics: This is available for free to anyone with a gmail account. Setup Analytics on your website to see details of your web page’s bounce rate, click-through rate, visitor retention time and an explanation of what these terms mean and why they are important.
• Google Webmaster Tools: Webmaster Tools like analytics helps you to determine certain key metrics happening with your website. Webmaster Tools has the additional benefit of guiding you in terms of your content organization and your search engine visitorship. Webmaster Tools can show you what keywords are getting you the most traffic and will serve as a helpful guide in creating content to better target the keywords that are working for you. You can also get insight into how your website structure and mobile compatibility affect your search engine rankings.
• Also, we throw in a server side web statistics software like AW Stats. Server-side statistic software can be a little more accurate in terms of telling you how many unique visitors you have in any given month. Server-side stats will also tell you how much bandwidth your website is consuming so you will know how your content is being consumed by your users and how that consumption is affecting your web hosting spend.

The level of visitor engagement on social media especially visitors directed to your social media pages from your website, is also good indication of how well your website is reaching your target audience.

The tools listed above are all free and can be setup upon request as an adjunct to your Managed Hosting and Maintenance plan with Blitz. These tools are key to informing your website strategy over the lifetime of your project.