Use your website traffic statistics to improve your results
You've built a great website and you've started to see your traffic counter increase rapidly. This is good news, right? Maybe it is, maybe not. You need to look beyond the number of visitors to your site. You need to analyze statistics for several different reasons. But before you dive deeper into the analysis and make full use of this information, you need to understand how to interpret the data.
Your web hosting company will probably provide you with basic information about web traffic. The data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don't know how to apply it to your particular business and website. There are two main stats you'll notice; hits and hits.
Visit numbers are the most accurate measure of activity on your website. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you'll get an idea of how far-fetched the concept of hits can be. For example, if your home page has 15 graphics, the server records this as 15 visits, when in fact we are talking about a single visitor visiting a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful for analyzing your website traffic.
So, at first glance it would seem that the more visits you see logged, the better you can assume that your website is working, but this is an inaccurate perception. You should also look at the behavior of your visitors once they land on your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.
The goal when analyzing your website statistics is to find out how well or poorly your site is performing for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how much time your visitors spend on your site on average. If the time spent is relatively short, it usually indicates an underlying problem. So the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.
It could be that your keywords are driving the wrong kind of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit quickly. Use knowledge of how much time visitors spend on your site to identify specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as an indicator of the effectiveness of your solution.
Another excellent statistic is the exit page statistic. This statistic will show you which page your visitors are leaving from on your website. This statistic can help you determine the effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have what you think is a large entry page and from there you expect visitors to move to different pages on your site, you would expect the exit page statistics to show this. But if you have high exit page stats from your landing page, then you know that visitors are not browsing your landing page. This will tell you that you need to adjust your login page.
As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages and the habits and motivation of visitors. This is essential information for any successful Internet marketing campaign.
After you've analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to move on to keywords and phrases. See if certain keywords are driving a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted a visitor is, meaning they find what they're looking for on your site and, even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase, the more valuable that keyword is.
However, if you find that a large number of visitors are being directed, or should I say misdirected, to your site for a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword requires adjustment. Keywords are vital to attracting quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. A detailed analysis of the keywords your visitors use to find your site will give you vital insight into your visitors' needs and motivations.
Finally, if you notice users finding your website by typing your business name, open the champagne! It means that you have reached a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of growing success.
As you can see, keeping a close eye on your website traffic statistics will turn your average website into a visitor-friendly site. Happy site visitors means sales!