Analysing your Website Statistics

Website Statistics Analysis

If you have a decent website hosting package, you will have access to a whole pile of website statistics. What is the best way to use this information?

If you want to optimise your online sales, then you may need to improve your understanding of your target market. Your website statistics are a vital resource and provide a lot more information than most webmasters are aware of.

Most webmasters know that the website statistics track the number of visitors and indicate the most popular pages. Some hosting packages even provide such detailed information as what keywords/key phrases visitors used to find your website. Such hosting stats show you the most popular Landing Pages and some may even show you the most common Exit Page so you can fix a poorly-performing page.

Sophisticated analytical stats provide you with a track of the exact steps each visitor takes on your website, showing what pages they visited and even how long they spent on each page. 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.
Search Engines and Keywords
For many websites, a search engine is the leading producer of traffíc. For example, Google is responsible for around 65% of traffic on this website. A Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign can produce excellent levels of highly- qualified leads with little expenditure. The key to a good SEO campaign is to continue the optimisation process.
Good analytics packages provide detailed information that is vital to your SEO campaign. You can view a líst of the keywords, or key phrases, that visitors have used to find your site. That information can be used to identify those keywords that are providing the most traffíc and then similar or aligned keywords can be added.
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 optimisation efforts, with a little online research.
Landing Pages and Referrer Pages
A good source of information is the líst 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, on another website, that directed them to your site.
Many novice webmasters believe that all the visitors land on your home page. This is definitely not what you want. Each page on your site is a potential source of search engine traffíc. You need to optimise every page as a potential Landing Page for a certain search question. If you have well- categorised pages then Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns should also be page dependent.
Alternatively, if you use any kind of advertising, it will pay to keep track of how each campaign performs. The referrer statistics will help you determine this. If you have links all over the Internet, then this can point you to the more productive of those links. Once that is determined, you can attempt to gain more links of a similar nature.
Visitor Experience
But how your visitors find your site should not be your sole fascination. Once a person reaches your domain, you should attempt to learn whether they had a positive experience. Of they did not, then why not. Fortunately, web analytics usually provide you with some very good statistics to help you.
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. Page loads are similar to the oft-misquoted ‘hits’. The key statistic is the number of unique visitor – that shows 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 fix it – quickly! These statistics can also provide you with popular pages 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 statistics.
Lots of Visitors but No Conversions
Many people place too much emphasis on driving traffíc to their site, and not enough emphasis on actually converting those visitors into 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 address this problem – it is in fact the most common problem on the ‘net. Typically, your site content may need improvement or the traffíc 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 at a Specific Page
This may be caused by the page being slow-loading, or boring or even offensive to some. The problem can usually be solved by improving 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.
These are just some of the ways that website statistics can help you have a successful website. If you would like me to analyse your main Conversion Pages, just email me.