@mods, please move if not in appropriate section, sorry for the inconvenience.

Me (web designer/developer) & my friend (investment banker) recently launched a website a month back and named it as "want2rich.com". It's a fianance/ investment related website and our primary target audience are resident Indians and NRIs. Website just completed a month of it's existence so we are very excited.

We must admit we are not that versed with Google Analytics and thus our lack of knowledge to understand how we performed so far. We do not have any previous data and we do not know to evaluate our website's performance. So we thought to share with you and to know your thoughts/ suggestions/ feedbacks. We would really appreciate and love to know how do you analyze the performance of a month old website.

Thanks and below are few stats grabbed from GA.

1,241 Visits
620 Unique Visitors
4,682 Pageviews
3.77 Pages/Visit
00:05:38 Avg. Time on Site
53.10% Bounce Rate
48.51% % New Visits

Traffic Source

48.35%Search Traffic
 600 Visits
23.13%Referral Traffic

287 Visits
28.44%Direct Traffic 
353 Visits

Cheers
Radiant

Good. Keep going with the free quality backlinks with different IP and optimized the long tail keywords to get more traffic.

Originally Posted by staceymattew

Good. Keep going with the free quality backlinks with different IP and optimized the long tail keywords to get more traffic.

Where? In one article page?

And what about things that actually matter???

like conversion, leads, sales or revenue?

"Time on site" doesn't pay for your hosting.

This is what I was thinking,

While, yes its good that you are being found via search engines and your getting visitors through the door.
If you havent sold anything or made any money from these visitors then isnt it just the same as not having any visitors?

You could have 1million hits a day and if you dont sell or make any money from them. Whats the point?

@chrishirst, @lynxus

I totally agree with you guys. While revenue is the ultimate goal we need to consider that website is just 30 days old. When a baby born we don't expect him/ her to be running in the first month, baby grows with time and learn to run one day. I am sure even "Facebook" didn't had conversion, leads, sales or revenue in first month of it's launch or even "webmaster-talk.com".

At this moment our focus is on content and we want to offer quality content to our visitors. We also want to educate/ aware people on the subject of finance, personal finance, economy. First we want to build a visitor base. Off course both of us (me & my partner) do not have experience in web marketing thus our effort is to visit forums, participate in discussions etc. And the first step was to understand how did the first month go? from the STATS we do not understand for a month old baby whats the ideal number of visit, visitor etc and are we in right track or not if we are not in right track then what should be done.

Oh, website is just the first step, we do have different business model in back of our mind.

I am sure the forums will be very helpful as myself been a member of design/coding related forums.

Any suggestion/inputs/ feedback will be great.

Thanks
Radiant

When a baby born we don't expect him/ her to be running in the first month, baby grows with time and learn to run one day.

Not necessarily.

Some species are up and running in hours.

Why souldn't a website be making revenue within hours of being launched?

It's only short sighted ignorance that makes you believe that sales only come from SE referrals.

Would you open a shop in the high street and be prepared to wait six or twelve months to make the first sale??

No??

Then WHY do you think that when opening an "online" shop.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Not necessarily.

Some species are up and running in hours.

I hope it's not so difficult to understand that those species are not human and do not run websites.

We would like to go in a traditional way of building loyal customer than frequent passerby and window shoppers.

I hope it's not so difficult to understand that those species are not human and do not run websites.

The analogy is purely metaphorical as your analogy of a "baby" is.

To assume that a shop, online or bricks and mortar has to mature BEFORE it makes any sales is ludicrous, especially when it is sales (and profit) that creates the growth of a business to "maturity".

A business doesn't sit and wait for growth to happen, while costing the owner to keep it open. The owner has to get off their arse and DRIVE paying customers to the premises.

What's wrong with passers by? Or window shoppers? Real people look in shop windows to see what is inside, and maybe think about buying.

But THAT really depends on WHAT you sell and what your target audience is.
Research has shown that men and women behave in the opposite way online, to what they do in the real world.

with online shopping men are more likely to "shop around" but women will "impulse buy".
The roles are reversed in the real world where women will visit many shops before going back and buying the first thing they looked at, while men will walk into a shop pick up what they want, pay and leave.

To make any kind of business successful you have to know your customers and their shopping habits. If you don't know your customers and where they look for items you are going to fail.

Growth doesn't happen by magic. YOU have to drive it.

understand,
there is only good !!
and from here you can go to superb !

GoodLuck!