Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

Deciphering Web Analytics
By Matt Jackson (c) 2007

Want to optimize your online sales? Improve your understanding
of your target market demographics? Need to increase your
marketing ROI? What right minded webmaster or online
entrepreneur doesn't, right?

Your web analytics are your gateway to measurable success and
provide a lot more information than most people give them credit
for. Yes, they track the number of visitors you receive and
indicate your most and least popular pages. However, they also
guide you towards your best performing keywords, the countries
that provide you with the most active visitors, and essentially
provide you with a blueprint of the exact steps each visitor
takes on your website.

Armed with this kind of information you should be able to
improve the overall performance of your website and your online
business. You can also improve your marketing efforts, enabling
you to concentrate on the more effective, and ignore the least
effective.

Keywords, Search Engines, And Popular Landing Pages

For many sites, the search engine is the leading producer of
traffic. An SEO campaign can produce excellent levels of highly
qualified leads with comparatively little spend. The key to a
good SEO campaign, though, is to continue the optimization
process.

Good analytics packages provide detailed information that is
vital to your SEO campaign. You can view a list of the keywords
that visitors have used in order to find your site. This
information can be used to identify those keywords that are
providing the most traffic and any that can be improved upon.

By reading the referrer of each visitor it is also possible for
most analytic programs to determine the search engine that
directed visitors to your site. Again, it is possible to use
this information in order to improve your optimization efforts,
with a little online research.

Landing Pages And Referrer Pages

A good avenue of pertinent information is the list of landing
pages and referrer pages. The landing page is simply the page
that a visitor first lands on when they reach your site, while
the referrer is the page that directed them to your site.

Don't be fooled into thinking that all of your traffic emerges
on your home page. At least, for most websites this shouldn't
be the case. Each page on your site is a potential source of
search engine traffic, and if you have well categorized pages
then PPC campaigns should also be page dependent.

Alternatively, if you use any form of advertising, it will pay
to keep track of how each campaign performs. The referrer
statistics will help you determine this very fact. If you have
links all over the Internet, then this can point you to the more
beneficial of those links so that you can attempt to gain more,
similar ones.

Visitor Experience

How your visitors reach your site shouldn't be your sole
fascination. Once a person reaches the fold of your domain, you
should attempt to learn whether they had a positive experience,
and, if not, then why not. Fortunately, web analytics typically
provide some very good statistics to help you with this.

Visitor and page load statistics. Whenever a page is loaded in
a browser it is logged as a page load. However, any single
individual can open numerous pages or may even open the same
page numerous times. The unique visitor figure is the number of
individual people that have accessed your site.

Visitor paths. You can track the actions of a visitor from the
landing page to the exit page. This includes every page they
visit in between, the amount of time they spend on each page,
whether they make a purchase or click any links while on those
pages, and more. This information is crucial to determining any
problem areas on your site. If a particular page is leading to a
lot of people exiting your site, then address it immediately.
These statistics can also provide you with hot spots you weren't
previously aware of.

Translating The Results

Translating the results need not be any more complicated than
actually reading them. Doing so, though, can seriously improve
your profits. Here are a few guidelines that can be used when
next viewing your analytics.

Lots of Visitors But No Conversions
A lot of people place too much emphasis on driving traffic to
their site, and not enough emphasis on actually converting those
visitors to customers. If you find that the pages of your site
are frequently being visited, but surfers are leaving without
becoming customers then you need to take action quickly.
Typically, your site content may need improvement or the traffic
you are gaining is not targeted to the topic of your website.
Look at visit lengths and paths to determine which is the case
for you.

Visitors are Leaving From a Specific Page
Again, this can usually be combated with improved content on
that page. If the content of an individual page is poor, but
the rest of your site is good, then you will usually see that
your visitors are navigating happily around your site until
they reach this one page. Check for broken links, inappropriate
content, or just poorly written content.

Traffic From a Specific Source is Particularly Inactive.
If you look at your referrer statistics and note that one source
of traffic is sending a lot of inactive visitors to your site
there may be one or more explanations. Check where the visitors
are being directed to and ensure that this page is well optimized
for conversions. Also do some digging on the referrer's end. A
banner or link placed on an irrelevant page is unlikely to yield
the positive results you are looking for.

These are just some of the ways that analytics can help you and
your website. Experiment and look for trends. Question anything
that you notice until you find the most reasonable answer, and
then take action accordingly.
================================================================
Article by Matt Jackson. WebWiseWords, website
content (http://www.webwisewords.com) that sells.
================================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.