As a website owner, you would want to analyze the progress of your website in terms of who is visiting it and how many times. This information would help you improve your website. However, to fetch this information, you would need a web analytics tool. Although, you could find all such information the log file; it can be a tedious task to read through a log file that has so many records in it. A web analytics tool serves as an ideal utility to explain you the traffic flow of your website with simple and sorted data. Web analytics is a useful exercise and you must know how to use it. Following is the description of the same.
To start with, you must collect the data. If you have a web analytics tool installed, it may already be doing the stuff for you. You need to include all aspects of your website that collect data. Such aspects include CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and other kinds of data that your website generates.
Once you have successfully collected the data, it needs to be transformed. It can be a tedious task to review the web logs manually. You would therefore need to transform the available data into an easily understandable format that can be manipulated. Most of the web analytics tools do this functionality as well. However, certain non-web log formatted data such as CGI may need you do the conversion.
Now that you have all the data available to you, in an easy to understand format; you need to start your analysis. This should be the most interesting part of your web analytics task. What you should be looking for is the trend in your web traffic. Following are some of the points to figure out the trend:
Is there a specific time when most of your visitors visit your website? What are the most visited pages of your website? How many pages does an average user view before quitting your website? On an average, how long do your visitors stay at the website? Does your traffic come from the search engines? What are the most common pages that most of visitors exit your website from? Who is linked up to your website?
You should now be setting bench marks for yourself. With all the analysis done, you know the strong and weak points of your website. You can now plan your actions and execute them to reach newer standards. For instance, you could add more business links to the pages that are frequently visited by the people, and optimize the lesser visited ones for more traffic flow. In short, you should work in a direction to capitalize on the strong aspects of your website and improve on the weaker aspects.
Your potential visitors need to know what updates you have made to your website. Unless they are aware of the updates, your hard work would go in vain. This certainly calls for the promotion of your website, highlighting the newly made updates, to attract the visitors.
You must repeat the above process time and again. This is in fact, a continual process that you must do.
To start with, you must collect the data. If you have a web analytics tool installed, it may already be doing the stuff for you. You need to include all aspects of your website that collect data. Such aspects include CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and other kinds of data that your website generates.
Once you have successfully collected the data, it needs to be transformed. It can be a tedious task to review the web logs manually. You would therefore need to transform the available data into an easily understandable format that can be manipulated. Most of the web analytics tools do this functionality as well. However, certain non-web log formatted data such as CGI may need you do the conversion.
Now that you have all the data available to you, in an easy to understand format; you need to start your analysis. This should be the most interesting part of your web analytics task. What you should be looking for is the trend in your web traffic. Following are some of the points to figure out the trend:
Is there a specific time when most of your visitors visit your website? What are the most visited pages of your website? How many pages does an average user view before quitting your website? On an average, how long do your visitors stay at the website? Does your traffic come from the search engines? What are the most common pages that most of visitors exit your website from? Who is linked up to your website?
You should now be setting bench marks for yourself. With all the analysis done, you know the strong and weak points of your website. You can now plan your actions and execute them to reach newer standards. For instance, you could add more business links to the pages that are frequently visited by the people, and optimize the lesser visited ones for more traffic flow. In short, you should work in a direction to capitalize on the strong aspects of your website and improve on the weaker aspects.
Your potential visitors need to know what updates you have made to your website. Unless they are aware of the updates, your hard work would go in vain. This certainly calls for the promotion of your website, highlighting the newly made updates, to attract the visitors.
You must repeat the above process time and again. This is in fact, a continual process that you must do.
About the Author:
Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Expert and entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business and consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon, BBC, AIG and many others.
