What You Need to Know About Web Analytics

Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under Web Analytics |

A critical component of monitoring your success is web analytics. This is the software often provided by your web hosting firm that tells you all about your visitor patterns. By viewing your web analytics, you can see who has come to your website, where they cam from, how long they stayed, and more. This is valuable information because it will not only show you that your business is growing, but it will confirm what marketing practices are producing for you, so you can determine how to adjust your marketing campaigns. If something is working well, then by all means, keep on doing it. If something is not working, but rather draining your wallet, by all means stop.

Type of Analytics
There are two types of web analytics traditionally used; log based and javascript based. Each of these has its merit, and I recommend using both. The good news is that you should be able to have access to both log and javascript based analytics for free. Many web hosting companies provide server log based analytics and Google offers a free javascript based analytics tool, called Google Analytics.

What to Look For
Some of this is pretty basic in that you want to watch your numbers daily, and expect to see increases in visitors, page views, and referrals. Referrals are critical because this tells you where you customers are coming from. If you have tapped into an effective means of web traffic, then look for ways to increase traffic from that source. If you are not seeing traffic from a source and you feel you should be, find out what is going wrong. The perfect scenario is having web stats grow weekly and show a steady increase in visitors, search engine referrals, and referrals from Social Media sites.

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