Well, the same thing applies to understanding the effectiveness of your website. Think about all the different types of people coming to your site: your competitors, your old girlfriend who found you on Linked-in, people looking for a company spelled like yours, people that found your site from a far-away place like Nebraska, but can’t ever use what your selling and of course, real, legitimate prospects who are trying to decide whether or not to do business with you.

While website analytics can tell you a lot about how people use your site, the truth is some of those people’s behaviors and patterns on your site, shouldn’t count. That’s why you have to do a deeper dive into the information that’s available to you.

Let me give you a quick example. We designed a website for a terrific local company that puts on a highly-regarded, well known high school band competition in Orlando every year. That event is called the “All American Music Festival” (www.allamericanmusicfestival.com).

Well, we were looking into how the site is performing and noticed that the bounce rate is uncomfortably high for us. (The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that view just one page and leave the site.) It was 56%.

We looked further and found a very interesting pattern.

Look at these numbers from people who came to the site using the search term “american music festivals.”

Now look at these numbers from visitors who came to the site using the search term “Marching Band Competition” (which is one of the terms that is key to the site’s success).

The visitors coming from “marching band competition” consumed on average three times as many pages per visit and stayed 3 minutes and 10 seconds longer on average. (It didn’t take the first group long to realize the site was not about what they were looking for did it??)

Most of the people coming from “American Music Festivals” came to the home page and left. When we reproduced a search for “American Music Festivals” we saw a lot of listings for various music festivals that one can attend. They were not competitions for high school students.

So the site was drawing traffic from natural searches that was never going to buy or be interested in our client’s product, but the popularity of the term and the amount of traffic was diluting the site’s overall metrics.

See the point? If you don’t really dive into your site’s performance you’ll be making decisions based on opinions, or metrics that really don’t matter. You don’t want to do that. Your Mom was right….