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copyright © 2003, by Karyn
Greenstreet. All rights reserved. The purpose of
analyzing your web site statistics is to look for trends and to research the
success level of your marketing campaigns. The numbers themselves can be
misleading, as statistical packages count “hits” in different ways. If
someone visits a page on your site doesn’t mean that they read it
completely. The
idea with web site statistics, then, is to look for trends. Instead of
looking at the numbers a concrete items, look at them over time to see if
they’re increasing or decreasing. For example, if you do an internet
marketing campaign, then look at your web site statistics to see if the
campaign increased the number of hits to your site.
With that said, here are some numbers you should look at:
Visitor Information
There are three
areas that are important to review each month and during each marketing
campaign. The number of unique visitors will help you to determine whether
your site is receiving more or less visitors each month.
The location tells you what country, and sometimes what State, the visitors
are coming from. This is important if you’re concerned about your global
reach to other countries, or if you’ve done a marketing campaign in other
States. Note that this is the State of the ISP where they connected to the
Internet. Because AOL is in Virginia, you will have an inordinate amount of
Virginia visitors, even though these people are actually all over the USA.
An important distinction is the concept of “visitors” versus “hits”. Each
person who visits your site is considered a “visitor”. Each time a visitor
looks at a page, that page and its contents are accessed, including the
graphics on the page. As example, say that your home page has two graphics
on it, plus some text. That is considered THREE elements on the page. When a
visitor visits that page once, your statistics will show ONE visitor and
THREE hits.
Time of Day Activity
This area of
your statistics helps you to determine which days of the week have the most
activity, and which time of day is the most active. This can be helpful to
know when to schedule chats and teleclasses. For instance, if Wednesdays at
3PM are popular times for your site, they may be popular times for
teleclasses. It’s important to note here that one of the most popular times
for people to search the web is weekdays after lunch. (People are at work
and having a sugar low after digesting their lunch and are surfing the net
instead of working.) If this is a popular time for people to be surfing the
net, then this might also be a popular time for an internet chat on your web
site.
Referrals
This section of your statistics will tell you who is sending people to your
web site. It lists which search engines people use, as well as which
keywords or key phrases people use to find your site. In addition, this
section will also list what other sites are linking from their site to your
site. (When someone links from their site to your site, it’s called an
“inbound link” or “incoming link”.)
Pages
This section of your statistics will help you to
determine which pages are visited most often, how long people stay on a page
(presumably to read it), and which page people exit your site from. Again,
trends matter here more than the concrete numbers. Are certain pages more
popular than others? Are people only spending 5 seconds on a page that
should take 3 minutes to read?
Error reports
This section
tells you where people had problems accessing your site. If people try to
access a certain page and can’t, it will be recorded here. If your site has
been unavailable, you’ll see these numbers rise.
For a list of all internet error message numbers and they’re corresponding
meaning, check out this website:
http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/error.asp
Conclusion
As you can see,
there are many number to look at in your statistics, and many ways to
interpret them. If you pay more attention to trends and problems, and less
attention to actual numbers, you’ll be ahead of the game!
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Karyn Greenstreet is a Self Employment expert and small business coach. She
shares tips, techniques and strategies with self-employed people to boost
clarity and focus, create sustainable motivation, and increase sales and
profits.
Visit her website at
www.PassionForBusiness.com
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