Exploiting Website Statistics

Unless you come up with a full proof flawless marketing plan, you will need website statistics to understand what marketing tactics have worked and which ones need refining or abandoning. Without constant trial and error and checking statistics and testing, proactive decision making becomes guess work. So, statistics are really important for a number of reasons;

Firstly, statistics help you understand the profile and behaviour of your website websites. Stats help you build up an overall mental picture of who your visitors are, which country they live in, which search engines they used to visit your site. For example, if the number of unique and long-tail keyphrases used by your unique visitors increases, it indicates greater search engine visibility.

You may begin to see regular patterns or groups of similar key phrases and entry 'landing pages' popping up in your daily or monthly reports. These provide strong indications of visitor positive browsing habits and motivations (particularly if phrases include action words like 'cheapest', 'buy', or 'compare'). Conversely, if your stats show up phrases that include lots of passive derivatives like 'how to xyz' or 'research data regarding abc', it may indicate you are attracting 'browsers' and not 'buyers'. This sort of data can be useful to refine your marketing messages and sales copy to increase conversion rates.

Secondly, website statistics help to validate your business assumptions. Inevitably your original marketing plan may need to change over time. If you have optimized your web pages for a particular set of key phrases, but you are not yet generating enough website traffic, you need to know why. Do not be too hasty to abandon your original assumptions as online marketing success does not happen overnight! Refer back to your original goals to see if you are attracting the right sort of website traffic (but just on a small scale). If the trend is upwards, do more of the same. Remember the caching process itself can take weeks just for a newly posted bit of content to become visible within a search engine. So statistics in the first month or two are not particularly relevant to establishing your original expectations will be met.

Lastly, statistics help to justify online advertising investment on a project by project basis. If your only online marketing tactic is to invest in pay-per-click advertising, statistics represents the bedrock of measuring return on investment (ROI). Your statistics will show the number of visitors, the average conversion rate per visitor, and pay-per-click campaign spend per landing page. ROI can be calculated by comparing stats of the cost of 'pay per click throughs' and subsequent sale conversions from any PPC landing webpage. The Click Through Rate (CTR) is the amount of times an advertisement is clicked on, divided by the number of times it is displayed (impression). Remember it is vital you have an internal system for tracking sales conversions related to online quote requests received.

Most commercial hosting packages include a statistics option. Most packages come with easy to understand graphs, charts and maps to give you a snapshot of what is going on. Most providers will offer:-

• Hits, Visits, Visitor and Unique Visitors - packages can distinguish between 'hits', (which are typically searchbots hitting a web page to cache it), versus real human visitors. A person can visit a website and click on eight different pages, representing eight hits. That same person (with a unique IP address) may return the next day and be counted again as a visitor. You should be primarily interested in unique visitors while understanding what % of visitors are 'returning visitors'. Visitor figures are collated on a daily, weekly and monthly timeframe. Most packages also show the amount of time an average user spends on site before they leave. Your aim as a Webmaster is to increase that average time by making the content more 'sticky', compelling and readable.

• Entry and Exit Paths - this tracks which engines or other websites visitors use to find your site and how they subsequently entered your website. It indicates your most and least popular pages. Large sites may see hundreds of entry pages showing up in their logs.

• Referrals - stats packages are great at telling you the names of other web sites that have links to your website and the number of visitors they have to sent you over a given period (as people click on the link to your site). What most packages can also tell you users browser type, what time they visited, stay duration and individual IP addresses. This information is useful because it tells you which geographies your visitors are coming from. It may show that the bulk of your traffic comes from of a country that your products and services are not relevant. If this is the case you can take what action to change your online marketing tactics.

• Search Engines - statistics are available to detail words and phrases individuals used and which search engine they typed them into, to subsequently visit your website. This is critical information and should be monitored on a daily basis.

Most shared hosting comes with statistical options. The most popular packages are:-

• Smarter Stats - smarter stats provide a very comprehensive range of statistics. It can be quite cumbersome to use for novice users (as there are many web pages to open and understand). It can provide a timeframe based analysis of visors by IP, recent, spiders, views per visit, monthly visitors and average visit length on site. It tracks entry and exit paths by filename and shows Referrals by keyphrase source, search engine and individual keyword. Its geographic country maps help you understand where your site visitors live.

• AwStats - AwStats are a widely used and free Perl based stats log analysis application. It is based around one summary page of all criteria described above. It can be download under a GNU General Public License. It breaks stats out into daily, weekly and monthly time periods.

• Webalizer - one of the older log analysis tools providing a one page overview of basic site based information. It usually comes free with shared hosting packages.

The biggest trend is to utilise 'in the cloud' based statistical services that provide vast amounts of real-time data. The major ones are:-

• Google Analytics - by far Analytics is the best and most comprehensive service. This is a fantastic free online service that makes obtaining feedback simple and easy to understand. You need a webmaster account and must verify yourself by email. The set up process simply involves placing a piece of unique script in the <header> of any webpage you want to track. Its easy to use interface is ideal for the novice webmaster. Pay particular attention to 'goal conversion' feature. This feature allows you to 'count' the number actionable events (such as a quote request confirmation page being displayed). Note the close relationship with Analytics, Adwords, Adsense and Webmaster Tools.

• Onestat - Advanced web analytics to track in-depth visitor behaviour, commerce, leads, click fraud and conversions. Professional web analytics software to track your web site, unique visitors, visitor behaviour, search engines and online commerce and advertising campaigns.

• Statcounter - a similar service providing:- Invisible Counter Option, Configurable Counter (script that tracks the amount of unique visitors that view that web page or the entire web site). It has many other useful options.

We hope this short guide gets you thinking about checking on as well as acting upon your website statistics.