website statistics
Even before you start a web site, you should have an idea what
kind of people will be visiting your web site. It is important
to determine your target market, so you can design your site and
its content in a way which is the most appealing to these groups.
Once you have launched your web site, you will need a way to
keep an eye on your web visitor traffic. This information will
help you understand what changes need to be made to use your web
site traffic or visitors better.
Every time someone visits your site, their information is recorded.
Where they came from, which pages they visited, where they “entered”
and “exited” your site, and so on. Traffic reporting
software, like Google Analytics and Urchin Statistics (owned by
Google) organises this data into meaningful patterns and reports.
These traffic reports or website stats reports are one of the
most overlooked tools available to help you understand how your
site is performing and to increasing its performance. Reading
these reports can uncover areas which can be improved and which
may bring you lots of business.
You can find out which pages visitors arrive at your site on,
how long visitors stay on your site and which page they exit from.
Are they there long enough to elarn about your business and action
something or do they just leave immediately. If they just leave
from the same page they arrived on in a matter of seconds, they've
either reached the wrong website or you need to engage them more
on that page and explain the benefits of your business.
You can also get information on how your potential customers
are finding your web site. Maybe through Google or Yahoo, or a
site where you have paid to be listed, or they just type in the
web address of your site. If the visitor comes through Google,
what do they enter to find you? If they are coming from a site
you pay to list on, is it worth the fee you pay for the visitors
you get? And so on.
You can also learn what pages of your web site are the most popular.
You could have an article on your site that's getting tons of
traffic and referring them onto your onine store.
However, you can have too much of a good thing. It's pretty useful
to choose a few statistics which are REALLY going to help your
business rather than getting too overwhelmed and giving up on
it. BY following just a few measurements really important to your
business you can improve the results and grow the business.
For example, a measure of success for an online store is the
number of completed sales. A great statistic to track could be
how many people drop off without finishing their purchase or don't
even start a purchase. If there's a big difference between visitors
and customers with completed sales, what's important will be getting
the people who come to your site to make or finish their purchase.
You can read more here about reading your statistics.