How To Use Web Analytics
In case you have a website, and want to know who is visiting it, you will need a web analytics tool. Of course, you could directly check the log and understand the behavior of users on your website. However, if there are too many records to read through, it can be a daunting task. A web analytics tool is a perfect piece of software that will give you the regular reports about who is visiting your website and how many times. You however need to know, how to use this utility effectively. Following is the explanation 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:
Do more visitors visit your site at a specific time? Which of your pages are the most commonly visited ones? How many pages does a visitor visit on an average? For how long does a visitor stay in the site? How much traffic do you get from the search engines? What are the exit pages of your website? Who has linked to your website?
Once you have completed the analysis of your website, you need to asses the reports and set new bench marks for the improvement. You must make action plans and execute them well. You may want to add more business ads to your hot pages, and promote the pages that are not very frequently viewed. Identify the weak points and improve upon them. Your aim must be to cash in on your strong points, and improve on the weak ones.
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 would need to repeat the above discussed procedure on regular basis. This procedure is an ongoing exercise that you must do always.
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.
