So it’s official, we have been Think it First for one week now. Of course we’re stoked, but what now? Let’s talk a bit about something more fun….ehem, DATA. It is amazing how much information your website is churning out at any given moment. That’s why it’s important to know how to properly set up tools and how to interpret the analytics those tools generate. We thought it would be fun to share some of our website data from week one so you can get a sense of what we look for in our own website analytics and how this data should be a strong driver for your online marketing efforts.

Geography: In its first seven days of life, thinkitfirst.com had 513 total visitors. Visitors from countries far and wide came to the site, including: the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Brazil, Tunisia, Haiti and more (13 countries in all including the U.S.). We attracted visitors from 29 of the 50 states including Nebraska, Minnesota and Oregon.

Traffic: Our new web friends found us through a wide variety of channels including search engines such as: Google, Bing, AOL Search and DuckDuckGo (check them out they are a local Philly company). About 40% of visitors founds us through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, so if you own a business, don’t let anyone tell you that social networks are a waste of time. Also, 17% of our first week’s traffic came from an HTML email we sent out to our customer database letting them know of our new company (check it out here: http://eepurl.com/mCe6H).

Technology: It is also important to know which devices, browsers and technologies your potential customers are using to view your website. This is to ensure that your site is optimized to work on those devices, giving your customers the best possible impression of your business. 26% of visitors viewed the Think it First website on Chrome, followed closely by Safari at 23%, 18% on Internet Explorer and 15% on Firefox. Did you think that most people use Internet Explorer? Not anymore. Perhaps the most surprising/interesting thing was that over 30% of our website traffic came from mobile devices. Of course, we took a lot of care when building our website to make sure that it looked and functioned properly on iOS and Android devices, and this confirmed our own and much of the speculation in the industry – go mobile, or get left behind. We expect the percentage of mobile visits to increase over the course of the year, and certainly increase into the future. When is the last time you visited your website on your phone? Try it now, we’ll wait here… Does the site looked completely jacked when viewing on your phone? Ouch, you could be losing almost half of your exposure to potential clients – costly? Yup.

So how do we know all of this? Well, this data was gathered through a variety of sources, the most valuable of which is Google Analytics. Installing and managing an analytics tool is critical to the success of your website. Not only do the analytics tell the story of who is visiting, from where they are visiting and how long they stayed, but it helps to lend valuable insights into the health and effectiveness of your website. Also, by connecting your website to Google, you inherently improve your SEO. While no one is sure that websites connected to Google Analytics are favored by Google in its search rankings – it’s very likely they are.

In an upcoming post, we’ll dive into what the analytics mean to your online strategy and how data visualized in your analytics expose a very telling story of the overall health of your business. Thank you to all of you who made up Think it First’s initial 513 visitors. We’ll do our part to keep the site current and continue to lend a little insight to better your business. Until next time…