Web Site Statistics
It is vital
that you know who visits your website, where they come from, which
pages they visit, when they leave etc. This article covers the reasons
why, and how to get the most from your web site statistics using
webtrends, web trends, web stats, web analysis, website analysis,
surveys, polls, link tracking etc.
Web Site Statistics
Just WHO visits
your website?
How did they
get to your site?
And did they
find what they were looking for?
All of these
questions are simple to ask, but may prove much more difficult to
answer! And if promoting your website is important for you, it
is vital that you have the answers so you are better able to
get what you want from your visitors and they are able to get what
they want from your website.
Read that last
sentence again, it's important.
If you can
answer questions like above, you will quite literally be able to
improve your website promotion results, and convert more
visitors into customers or leads (that is the reason
why you want to promote your website, isn't it?).
Answering
these questions in the long term will show you what promotion methods
work best, and on which medium. And above all, these answers will
be able to tell you just how targeted your
website traffic is, and how well you put your message
across.
(Ultimately,
getting millions of visitors is pointless, if all these visitors
do is make a quick exit elsewhere!)
There are various
ways to understand who your visitor is, and where s/he comes from.
These include asking for feedback, link-tracking,
understanding your website stats (web logfiles - see below),
using cookies, personalization
of your website, and running online surveys.
As I keep saying,
this is a basic website promotion guide, so I shall only cover a
few of these topics briefly. There is always further reading, if
you want more!
Website Analysis
When people
visit your website they usually leave a trace in your web logfiles.
You can analyse these logfiles via your web hosting package and
tools like Webalizer or Awstats, or you can install 3rd party stat
tools like Webtrends,
hitbox and Statcounter.
Basically,
whatever method you choose to use, you need to look out for the
following metrics:
- unique visits
- identified by cookie, perhaps, in a set time-frame (usually
24 hours)
- return visits
- as above
- pageviews
- number of pages visited, as opposed to
- 'hits' -
number of files downloaded (e.g. images, javascript, html pages
etc.)
- exit/entry
pages
- referrers
- includes search engines, web sites and even other pages on your
website
There is a
strong relationship between the success of a website and the understanding
you have of the above metrics. If you ignore these web site statistics,
then you are probably ignoring your site visitors and your business
profits!
Link-Tracking
Link-tracking
means tracking links to your website on other sites as well as tracking
the links that site visitors click on your website. A
good stats package or logfile analysis package will be able to track
links clicked whilst on your site, so I shall simply discuss the
other type of link-tracking (both link-tracking solutions come as
standard benefits of building your site with Site Build It! by the
way!).
There are many
services or programs on the Internet that will allow you to track
your links. This means that instead of providing a link like
- www.yoursitehere.com/subject2/link1.html
on your website,
or in your newsletter or advertisement, you can provide a link like
- www.trackyoursite-service.com/sub2_link1.html
or
- www.yoursitehere.com/sub2_link1.html
depending on
which type of solution you choose.
You simply
examine your logfiles, or check with the link-tracking service,
to see how many times a particular link has been clicked. And using
link-tracking also provides you with the following benefits:
- You can
keep links short. Useful for ezine advertising, say, or
with your email signature
- You can
simply hide your links
The following
sites offer services that do all of the above
Surveys and Online Polls
Survey your
website visitors.
Find out what
they want!
Makes sense,
doesn't it?
If you make
your surveys fun, you will have more chance of people filling them
in, and may even provide yet another reason for people to visit
your site! You can find an excellent free Perl/CGI script to create
your own survey at Bignosebird, but my recommended
resource is Willmaster's Perl/CGI program Master
Quiz
And finally...
It's vital
that you understand just who is visiting your website, where they
come from, and they are looking for. This information - accessible
using a combination of free and paid-for resources - will allow
you to improve your website promotion efforts, and to convert
more visitors into customers.
Whichever method
you choose, you should learn to love web site statistics. It could
well be the difference between website success or failure. Really.
Reminder:
This
page is about using website statistics to know your visitor and
to know about the popularity (or otherwise) of your website -- please share this page
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