| Effectively Doing Web Analytics |
|
|
|
| Written by JustinHarrison | |
| Tuesday, 23 June 2009 | |
|
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.
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. The first thing that you need to do is collect the data. If you have web analytics tool handy, it would take care of the same. You must ensure that you have included all the data collecting parts of your website. These parts could be the CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and any other data that may be generated by the website. 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. With all the collected and transformed data, you can easily proceed with your analysis now. This is arguably the most interesting part of your web analysis campaign. You need to identify a trend in the traffic flow. Following points would help you do just the same. 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? After having done the data collection, and transformation of the same into reports, it is time to set new goals. Now that you know what your good and points are; you can build up on the good points and improve on the weak points. You may wish to add business links to your most visited pages, and promote the lesser visited pages. The idea should be to bank on your strengths to achieve more, and lift up your weakness to convert them into strengths. Your visitors must know what changes you have made to your website. For this, you will need to promote your website in a way that your updates are highlighted. Unless people know about the improvements, it serves no good. You would need to repeat the above discussed procedure on regular basis. This procedure is an ongoing exercise that you must do always. 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. From the Webmaster: "Having the opportunity to share my hobbies and interests with so many people around the world gives me great satisfaction. As a bonus, I blog and produce websites about topics that interest me and receive ad revenue from the websites and Blogs."
|