|
Analyze Your Web Site Statistics
Visitor Tracking and other user statistics
Your free hit counter or free web counter may not include all the necessary
data to give you a complete picture of your web site performance.
In tracking Visitors across your website, you must be able to not only distinguish
unique and returning visitors, you need to be able to compare the data across time
periods. You also need to measure percentages of change so that you can measure
your progress in optimizing your web pages.
The Visitors Page should show you the following:
Total Visitors
New Visitors
Returning Visitors
Pages Per Visit
Visits Per Day
Average Time Per Visit
Visitor Detail Page
The visitor the most important element in your web analysis arsenal and is the basis
for all of the other website statistics. Without visitors, you get nothing: No hits,
no data, no sales and NO Income!
All other data are, or should be, tied to the visitor so you will know how they
use your site. By this we mean that you should be able to see where each visitor
came into your site, where they came from and where they went while they were there.
You should also be able to tell how long they spent on each page.
Your web site traffic statistics service should distinguish between New Visitors
and Returning Visitors. This is very important. It helps you determine how effective
you are in getting new visitors, and how well you retain them. This is often referred
to as ‘stickiness’. It is a vital element in sales tracking as well,
but we will get to that later.
You can compare the Total Visitors – the combination of both New and Returning
Visitors - for the current period against the previous period to get an idea as
to the overall direction of your business. (A good service will provide this information
as part of the package.)
If your visitors are broken into New and Returning Visitors as they should be, you
get a very good feel for their attitudes about your site. If you get a lot of new
visitors, but few returning visitors, then your site content probably needs to be
made more appealing. Of course, you must also give your visitors a reason to come
back, so pay attention to content.
If, on the other hand, your new visitor numbers are falling, your marketing plans
are most likely off target, since you are not appealing to the right crowd. Fire
your Marketing Guru. If you are the Marketing Guru, fire yourself and get someone
else to rework your marketing strategy. Never be afraid to admit that you don't
know everything.
Pages per Visitor
This item will tell you how well your visitors use your site. Increasing the number
of pages per visitor shows that your potential customers are finding more relevant
content. If it begins to rise, you are on track and sales should also begin to rise.
If they don’t, then look for signs of trouble in your content or purchasing
process. You would be surprised how many people abandon the site because they find
the purchasing process to difficult, confusing or time consuming.
Visits Per Day
This number smoothes out the visits for the time period being studied. There may
be a wide variation from day to day in your numbers and 'Visits Per Day' gives you
a way to compare traffic for different time periods.
Time Per Visit
The amount of time spent on your site is another good indicator of how well received
your site is. It may not tell you much if it is not increasing, but it will certainly
be an early indicator of falling interest. This will probably be one of the first
warning signs of visitors losing interest in your site, so pay close attention to
it.
|