How often do you check your web traffic status? If your answer is never, then it is time you start doing so. Measuring and analyzing your website’s success is an important step which is often ignored by many website owners. Your sales might be pretty good for your website but without the knowledge of your visitors like who they are, where they go, what they are looking for, where they leave and what turns them off, you might be losing many potential customers. By analyzing your website along with your marketing efforts you can improve the overall performance. Web analytics is measuring the results against your goals and check how much success your website has been able to achieve.
Goals – Current Results = Website Success rate.
To improve your results you need to measure, understand and adjust the events that lead to the result. You need to drive targeted traffic to your site and use web analytics to analyze and measure user behavior.
There are mainly three steps you need to follow in order to improve your website traffic. The first step is to drive targeted traffic onto your site by various marketing strategies like SEO and PPC. The next step is to persuade the visitors to take desired action on your site. You can have an appealing website with newsletter subscription or software demos to download. The third step is to use web analytics to analyze customer behavior. Using web analytics to analyze your site is a new method. This helps you keep track of the end results produced by the former two steps. With the help of this you can monitor and make improvements of the previous steps. You can keep track of the website traffic by knowing where the visitors are coming from, the area where they leave the site, the keywords that were used to find your website, where they navigated your site from and keep track of the actions taken by them on your site. This information can help a great deal to improve your business.
There are two types of web analytics: on-site and offsite web analytics.
On-site web analytics: This type of web analytics measures visitor’s session on your website. It means it checks the pages that encourage people to buy your product, the pages that drive them away and the ones attracting more visitors. It measures the website performance in a commercial context. The data collected from here is used to compare against the key performance and used to improve the webpage of the marketing campaign.
Off-site web analytics: You can make use of this even if u do or do not own/ maintain a website. It measures the various opportunities in the market like potential customers, the visibility of a website and other factors that affect a website promotion.
Setting Up Web Traffic Monitoring Devices:
You need to track your site users using more discrete methods. Here are some methods you can adopt to check your website visitors’ status:
1. Install hit counters on your site:
You can install hit counters on your site or blog to check the amount of visitors. With the help of this you can keep track of the increase of decrease in the amount of users on your site. There are number of counter providers that’ll let you run their script on your website. You can paste their code on your website and keep track of the daily visitors. Few of the counter providers are Counter.com, eXTReMe Tracking, Promotion Stat.
2. Use your web host statistical package:
The good thing about using a reliable hosting service is that every time someone visits your site, you web host server records the user’s activities in a log file. The data in this log is usually abbreviated and cryptic making it difficult and time consuming to use. Your Web host uses a software tool to import the log-file data into a built in database which in turn transforms the data into readable and easy to understand statistical reports. Analog (http://www.analog.cx) is of the popular software tools used by Web hosts. You can visit their websites to learn more about it. Web host statistical package includes daily transmission statistics, total transfers by client domain, transfers by reversed subdomain and total transfers from each archive section.
3.Purchase a web traffic analysis software:
The log file provided by your Web host is not in a user-friendly readable form. There are many web traffic analysis software applications available to collect the required data. These software applications summarize the results in an easy graphical and readable reports based on the information provided by the web host. Some of these applications work with your web ISP’s web server and hence saves you time and freedom to manage the entire process. Being flexible, these applications help you control what you want to include or exclude.
In the past, web analytics used measure things like server hits, entry pages, exit pages, unique visitors, repeat visitors, first page visited and the time spent on the site. The advanced web analytics are more business specific and can show us conversion ratios, browse to buy rates and customer acquisition costs. As the technology improves web analytics are able to help us find other aspects of web as well. At present web analytics help us analyze visitor’s behavior. This information could be used to improve your SEM strategies, keyword selection, site architecture and design. You can also improve the marketing methods and follow the appropriate steps to bring relevant web traffic on to your site. Web analytics is the best way of improving your return on investment (ROI).
