What your Web site analytics can tell you

Web analytics is the study of online experience, in order to improve it.

Through analysis of the traffic flow to and through your website, you can learn which products and services create the most interest for your visitors and are reaching business goals. You can also use analytics to identify problems areas of your site that may be loosing visitors or causing errors.

TRAFFIC

How many people viewed your site?
What is the average number of unique visitors who go to your site each month? Ten thousand per month is a good goal for a profitable Web site. Ok, so 10,000 visitors went to your Web site, tell me more….

Traffic Patterns
By studying your traffic logs you can see what days of the month or week generally get the most traffic to your site. This is important to note if you update your website several times a month or do additional offline marketing. You can also track how many of your visitors are repeat visitors. If they are repeat visitors is there anything new for them to see?

How many pages on the site were visited?
When Web site stats tell you 10,000 visitors viewed 30,000 pages, this means that each visitor went to an average 3 pages . This is the average for many smaller Web sites.

What interior pages are visited the most?
Well, let's say you have an interior page about Wood Burning Fireplaces . If this is one of the most visited pages, you can assume that fireplaces are one of your products or services your visitors are most interested in. These are the pages that should be updated the most frequently to retain repeat visitors. For small sites the home page usually gets the most traffic.

REFERRALS

How do visitors find your site?
One of the most useful references is the search engine log files. These files provide information on the exact terminology people searched to find your site.

For example, if 150 people came to your site looking for “Fireplace Ideas ,” this would tell you that these visitors were interested in purchasing a fireplace or some kind of fireplace accessories. If your site offers e-commerce, they may complete a purchase.

Do statistics work for smaller, locally operating companies?

Guess what…people search the Internet for local products and services more frequently than ever before. Why? Many choose the Internet because it works and is faster than opening a phone book. In fact, one of the major focuses in the last year by both Yahoo and Google is to index by region. Google can target ads just to people searching in a specific city or state.

Surfers are starting to use the “ Local ” tabs in the major search engines. One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of searchers just enter the location and a product or service: i.e. Highland Park fireplace . Will your Web site be located with this type of a specific search?

Using pay-per-click you can leverage additional local-only traffic to your site. If you want to advertise your product and/or services in specific locations, you can purchase Google keywords to be shown only to people searching in and around the Chicago area. This is very useful if you only do business locally, and it makes it easier for local people to find you.

It's easy to worry about the cost of a web analytics. They can be difficult to understand and aren't easy to get the most from. What you really need is an expert who can easily interpret the data and point out the problems. However to not use web analytics is like throwing away free marketing data about your customer preferences.

Many web designers may not want their clients to see the log files from their site especially if the numbers are low because they have not taken the time to design the sites to be properly indexed by search engines. Many websites done entirely in flash or with all images can't be read by search engines. In other words any of the text that is embedded in the flash animation or images can't be indexed. If this has all the information about your company it doesn't matter how nice it looks if nobody can find it.

Goals

What is the desired action for visitors to accomplish on your web site? A common example would be for a visitor to fill out a form with contact info that generates a lead. Another would be to make a purchase or sale from the site. By identifing these goals you can then set up your analytics to track them and measure the effectiveness of your campaign.

See Also:

Search Engine Optimization
20 general rules to follow to build well searched and indexed web sites.

Chicago Web Designer Blog (Updated Daily)
I post the latest news, web design and marketing articles here.

John Schuster
Chicago, IL 60647
Cell: 630-476-1545
Fax: 630-214-0703

last edited Tuesday, April 15, 2008 2:28 PM