It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone who visits your website. Web analytics are extremely interesting for those of us who are just a little bit nosy, but can also help you make strategic decisions about how to best meet the needs of your users, or about how to best capture traffic on the web.

You can find out all sorts of things about your visitors from your tracking software. For instance, yesterday I discovered that Belgians tend to spell Sydney, Australia with an ‘i’ instead of a ‘y’ (Sidney instead of Sydney). This could come in handy if I was ever running a travel campaign advertising trips to Australia from continental Europe – I would know to include the misspelling in my PPC keywords.

You can also find out whether or not a visitor liked your content by analysing your bounce rate. The higher your bounce rate, the less relevant your content is to the keywords that are bringing visitors to your site, and the less likely you are to actually make any profit from that visit. If you see a high bounce rate, it’s time to take a look at your page and see what’s missing. For instance, one page on my site listed information about an exhibition that was running at a major museum. Visitors were finding the site by searching for the title of the exhibition, but leaving almost immediately. After taking a look at the page, I realised that it did not list opening times, ticket prices, or information on how to find the museum. Adding these items decreased the bounce rate significantly.

Clearly, these are just a few of the things that analytics can tell you about who is visiting your site and why. In the coming weeks, I’ll be going into much more depth about the power of analytics, particularly in combination with split testing and multivariate testing.