| |
Marketing Tips
Unraveling the Mystery of Your Website Statistics |
| |
Understanding your website statistics is the first step to understanding how
successful your current online marketing strategy is and from there using this
information to improve your results.
Sadly, in the last decade I have yet to encounter anyone asking for search
engine optimisation assistance that had any understanding of their website
statistics. Indeed, most did not even know if they had any, let alone how to
understand them. If they did have a statistics package it was usually
inadequate and did not provide them with the right sort of information. |
Absolute basics your website statistics should tell you are:
-
Unique Visitors: This is the actual number of people who have visited
your site and to begin with you should look at these on a monthly basis. On a
healthy site you would expect good visitor numbers with a trend of growth.
-
Number of Visits: This will normally be higher than Visitor numbers as
some people will have been interested enough to come back and look again at
your website. If a person has visited your site more than once this may
indicate they are a potential customer.
-
Pages Viewed: This lets you know how many pages each person looked at
and allows you to gauge their interest. If visitors do not stay long it may
mean its time to renew your content and/or freshen up your websites appearance.
Note: Hits is a misleading figure as it includes all individual parts of a page
such as images. If your statistic package only gives you Hits you need a new
one.
-
Referring Search Engines: This shows you how many people actually found
your site whilst doing a search on engines and tells you how much search
traffic you are getting. On a site that has at least some level of search
optimisation, Google will be the overwhelming leader.
-
Referring Sites: This will show you how many people followed links to
your site from other websites. This is of particular interest if you are
conducting online advertising which links to your website as it will show you
if you are getting a good return on your advertising investment. It is
important to know how much you are paying for each click and if it represents
value.
-
Search Key Phrases: This is the actual phrase the person was searching
for when they found your result in their search and clicked through to your
site. Are a lot of people finding you on a good wide range of terms relating to
the goods & services you offer? If they aren't then you may need to look at
your site and update your content and/or site platform and structure
accordingly.
Note: In order for you to get search results, your website pages and copy
should contain the key phrases which a person would use on a search engine to
find your site.
If it turns out your statistics do not give you the information you require,
two website statistic packages you could try are AW Stats for those who are
hosted on UNIX boxes and Stat Counter for those on Microsoft boxes. The good
news is that both of these programs are free.
There are of course more statistics which can be very useful but these are the
basics from which you will be able to understand clearly whether or not your
website is performing in the search engines. Whatever your niche, people are
looking for it, so if you can't be found organically in search results you are
missing out on business.
Source: Alison, September 2007 website:
http://exchangeclassifieds.com.au
|
| |
|
|
Plan 
