Website analytics play a pretty important part in both determining how much value you get from your website (in terms of traffic, enquiries and business etc), but also in finding areas in which you could make your website even more successful.

There are many different website statistics and analytics packages on the market, some are free, while some require payment. Our preference is to use the freely available Google Analytics, which offers plenty of valuable information about your website right away, but can also be customised to provide more in depth statistics.

So how can the statistics and information found in your site analytics help you improve your website?

This month's Web Wise Business 3 Free Tips looks at three prominent statistics and the types of improvements they suggest you should make:

1. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who have arrived on your website before quickly leaving to visit another website without viewing more than one page. Ideally you want this statistic to be low, while the average level for different types of sites (brochure, e-commerce, news, events etc) will vary, below 45% is pretty good going.

If you find you have a high bounce rate, you might want to consider more clearly defining your content and creating realistic visitor expectations in any directory listings or advertising before they land on your website. Someone clicking on a Google Ad for car parts which takes them to a photographers website isn't likely to stick around for long!

It is also worth considering how accessible your website is to users - how easy is it to navigate / find what your looking for, how intuitive is it to use etc.

2. Average Time on Site

This refers to the average amount of time visitors are spending on your website. Obviously, in most cases, the longer the better - though for some e-commerce sites, the quicker a visitors becomes a customer, the better.

If you find the average time visitors spend on your website to be low, you may want to consider how engaging and relevant the content on your website is likely to be to them - do you provide value enough to make them stick about?

Design can also be an important factor - visitors are more likely to spend time on an attractive, well presented website, than a relic of the late 90's.

3. % New Visits

This refers to the percentage of visitors to your website who have not visited before. When looking at this statistic, it is worth taking into account both the total number of visits to the website and the time period which you are looking at. While it is good to have a steady stream of new visitors to your website, if none of them comeback then chances are something isn't right!

If your find the percentage of new visits statistic to be unusually high, without any correlation to promotions such as competitions, then you may want to again consider the quality of the content you provide, along with how you maintain regular contact with visitors / customers. E-newsletters can be a very powerful tool for bringing visitors back to your website on a regular basis.