Filed Under: Articles, SEO, Web Site Stats
You probably get some web site statistics on visitors from your web host — maybe in the form of an incomprehensible log file. If you’re lucky you might get a rough analysis
showing how often individual pages have been viewed.
Or maybe you just have some sort of counter on your home page. You know those cool, free stat counters that you find on every second web site. Truth been told, not a very satisfactory measure of site traffic, and definitely completely useless in a business perspective
Defining What to Measure and What to Analyze: KPI
If this is as much as you do with the data, you’re definitely missing out on a lot of vital information which can really help you to fine-tune your site, steering visitors to those areas which you want them to visit - like your order page? Every web site has Key Performance Indicators, or KPI’s. A KPI is a measurement of what you want people to do on your web site — after all, your web site have a goal, a purpose — Right?
Say your site is selling a piece of software. Your main KPI would be how many visitors buy the software or download a free trial of the software. Maybe you have a news letter that you send every month with offers and information about your products or services. One KPI would be how many sign up for the newsletter — another how many that click the links in your email and visits your Special Offer page.
Or it can simply be one of the most obvious KPIs: How many users, how many page loads and for how long do they stay on your site. The longer they stay on your site, the more interesting your visitors find your site.
Defining the KPI for a web page can be hard, but is extremely important for measuring how efficient your web site really is. One of the most important KPI’s for SEO Bomb is how many visitors get in touch with me and ask about SEO services for their web site.
Some sites are simply about branding and promoting a certain product. Take Coca Cola for example. They sell all their products in stores, yet they have spent quite a few dollars on their website, and must have an incredibly advanced tracking system for their sites success.
The Web Stats Program
After having defined your KPIs, how do you measure it? You need a Web Site Stat program, and these come in many, many flavours — from the simplest and most dreadful web based ones, like Webalizer, to simple, yet useful and free web stats like AWStats. If your budget allows it, you can go for the more advanced solutions, like ClickTracks, Omniture SiteCatalyst or Deepmetrix Live stats.
These are all awesome, yet fairly pricy solutions that will certainly give you control over your visitors. There are also programs that include a number of other powerful tools for SEO and Keyword Analysis, such as WebCEO. WebCEO is the program I use on this site, so I highly recommend it. The program itself is free, but the price for the web stats module really isn’t bad either.
Whatever web stat solution you choose, they must be able to show you the following information:
- Number of visitors
Simply the number of visitors you get. One visitor may visit your site more than once, so you need: - Number of unique visitors
The number of unique visitors. - Visits per user
This number tells you how many times each visitor visits your web site - Time spent on site per user Also referred to as “stickiness”. What this number basically mean is how long the visitors stay on your site.
- Most popular pages
Which pages does your visitors like? Which pages does not get a lot of traffic? Extremely useful information, and you can use these numbers to determine many things such as what kind of content does your visitors like? Which pages rank well in search engines? Which pages does not rank well in search engines? Most popular pages, Search Engines and Keywords & Key Phrases gives you the most important information about how well you perform in the Search Engines and how you can drive traffic to your site via SE’s - Demographics
From which country or state does your visitors come from? - Days of month and Days of week
This tells you on which day of the week you get the most visits. These and Time of day are very important numbers. If you’re a B2B company, and you get most of your visits in the weekends and after 5 in the afternoon, your web site is probably targeting the wrong visitors, because they are browsing from home. - Referrers
Referring sites can be very useful. Is there a particular site that send you a lot of traffic? Maybe you should consider buying advertisement on that site. - Search Engines
Simply an overview of which search engines are sending you the most traffic and how much. This is usually Google. - Search Key Phrases and Key Words
An overview of which keywords drive traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t listed the ever-so-popular “hits” in the list, and the reason is very simple — there’s no point, and it’s a completely useless number when analyzing from a business perspective. Or any perspective for that matter.
One hit means every time the server gets a request for a file. That means that if I have one page on my site, but I have packed it with a million tiny 1 by 1 pixel pictures, I get one million and one hits (remember, one for the html file itself) every time a visitor loads that page. Doesn’t sound too impressive anymore, does it?
With a simple and free web stat tool such as AWStats, you have all this information presented in an easily understandable format. By now you should have a general idea about site statistics, but how can you use it to make your web site more profitable?
One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your “sales”. Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.
Traffic vs. Sales Performance
Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave — and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.
Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the rest of the page.
The more interruptive banner ads you have on your page, the more this rule will apply. What do you do if some one yells directly into your ear? Of course you cover them. Internet users nowadays, and experienced users in particular, have developed what I like to refer to as tunnel vision — they simply block everything but the content they’re reading. Sounds familiar? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were one of them. After all you’re reading a rather nerdy case study about web site stats.
Both SiteCatalyst and ClickTracks have a really nice feature that lets you open your site, and it will highlight the links that are most popular — with number of clicks, percentage and all. Very nice and incredibly useful feature.
So how do you solve this problem? By adding links to the download page in the content of the popular page. Whoever’s reading that page cannot avoid to notice it, and it will drive traffic to the download page. One of my goals with this site is to share my page about SEO Links and Resources.
Just for fun, scroll up and count how many links I have to that section of the site. Did you already click on any of them? If so, I guess that proves my point.(And I hope you find it useful, because I spend a lot of time on it.)
And if this page doesn’t have enough info, maybe you can find some more useful tips on web statistics on asymptomatic.net
Web Site Trend Analysis
Here comes the fun part. By following the trends over time, you get a better overview of what’s going on. On your site, and on the internet. I can tell you that most of the web sites I’ve been involved in to date gets the most traffic on a Thursday. It doesn’t matter what month or what year. Thursday is traffic day. Of course it depends on what business you are in, but I am confident this applies for most business sites.
Obviously, leisure sites will have a different traffic pattern. Take a online casino site for example. Chances are they receive the most traffic in the weekends and in the afternoon on weekdays. Chances are also that they are most profitable in the beginning of each month and in the middle of each month. Why, you ask? It’s pretty simple. Payday the 15th and the 30th.
Wild guess — on which days of the month does it make most sense for the online casino site to launch a new campaign? In the beginning and in the middle of the month, of course. That’s when their potential customers have money available.
By looking at your web site statistics and by analyzing your target audience, you can tweak the performance of your web site. It doesn’t matter if you are a one man company, a mid size corporation or a Fortune 500 Company — Everybody can increase web site performance and revenue by analyzing your web site stats and applying the proper strategy accordingly.
Sverre Sjøthun
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By prolan1 on 08.05.08 3:16 pm | Permalink
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