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Casual Articles - Website Analytics: How to Analyze Your Website Stats
Search Engine Submission and Optimization are by far the most cost-effective ways to generate constant visitors on your web site.There are many advantages to hiring a search engine optimization consultant who will help you to get a better search engine ranking when a search is performed on the internet.This is vital for your business because it will help driving to your website more targeted traffic that may not have been possible otherwise.Search engine optimization through a SEO consultant would mean being able to delegate him the optimization process freeing you to deal with other important aspects of your online business operation.In addition, you can also ask for Search Engine Optimization coaching. This allows you to get valuable information on how to optimize your website and achieve a high ranking for your targeted niche. A SEO consultant will also teach you some internet marketing pitfalls that may break your business and motivation!The SEO consultant does all the research which includes analysis of your competition and identifying keywords as well as keyword phrases to optimize your website. You can also get the SEO consultant to design and manage your pay per click advertising campaigns.And finally, the SEO consultant will start a link building cam
One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.
Traffic vs. Sales Performance
Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave -- and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.
Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the
Just as manuscripts are screened by assistants before reaching an editor, business plans submitted to financial institutions and venture capitalists are almost always screened by someone like me, a professional analyst who gets paid to "manage risk," which is MBA-speak for finding legitimate reasons not to fund your project. In this article I provide tips on getting your business plan past me and on to the people who sign checks. That's easier said than done, as research consistently shows that only a tiny fraction of business plans ever result in financing.Before I delve into specific recommendations, let's briefly review the purposes of a preparing a business plan.In practice, a business plan has three purposes and three purposes only: (1) to demonstrate the validity of your business model (including the existence of a market); (2) to establish the qualification of your team to execute your business model; and (3) to convince investors/lenders that the only thing you're missing is capital. That's it. Anything else you try to make it will detract from these goals.If you want your business plan to make it to the Loan or Investment Committee, consider following these 8 recommendations:1. Present the Right Type of Plan to the Correct AudienceGenerally speaking, t
Or maybe you just have some sort of counter on your home page. You know those cool, free stat counters that you find on every second web site. Truth been told, not a very satisfactory measure of site traffic, and definitely completely useless in a business perspective
Defining What to Measure and What to Analyze: KPI
If this is as much as you do with the data, you’re definitely missing out on a lot of vital information which can really help you to fine-tune your site, steering visitors to those areas which you want them to visit -- like your order page? Every web site has Key Performance Indicators, or KPI’s. A KPI is a measurement of what you want people to do on your web site -- after all, your web site have a goal, a purpose -- Right?
Say your site is selling a piece of software. Your main KPI would be how many visitors buy the software or download a free trial of the software. Maybe you have a news letter that you send every month with offers and information about your products or services. One KPI would be how many sign up for the newsletter -- another how many that click the links in your email and visits your Special Offer page.
Or it can simply be one of the most obvious KPIs: How many users, how many page loads and for how long do they stay on your site. The longer they stay on your site, the more interesting your visitors find your site.
Defining the KPI for a web page can be hard, but is extremely important for measuring how efficient your web site really is. One of the most important KPI’s for SEO Bomb is how many visitors get in touch with me and ask about SEO services for their web site.
Some sites are simply about branding and promoting a certain product. Take Coca Cola for example. They sell all their products in stores, yet they have spent quite a few dollars on their website, and must have an incredibly advanced tracking system for their sites success.
The Web Stats Program
After having defined your KPIs, how do you measure it? You need a Web Site Stat program, and these come in many, many flavours -- from the simplest and most dreadful web based ones, like Webalizer, to simple, yet useful and free web stats like AWStats. If your budget allows it, you can go for the more advanced solutions, like ClickTracks, Omniture SiteCatalyst or Deepmetrix Live stats.
These are all awesome, yet fairly pricy solutions that will certainly give you control over your visitors. There are also programs that include a number of other powerful tools for SEO and Keyword Analysis (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#free-seo-tools), such as WebCEO. WebCEO is the program I use on my site, so I highly recommend it. The program itself is free, but the price for the web stats module really isn’t bad either.
Whatever web stat solution you choose, they must be able to show you the following information:
- Number of visitors
Simply the number of visitors you get. One visitor may visit your site more than once, so you need:
- Number of unique visitors
The number of unique visitors.
- Visits per user
This number tells you how many times each visitor visits your web site
- Time spent on site per user
Also referred to as "stickiness". What this number basically mean is how long the visitors stay on your site.
- Most popular pages
Which pages does your visitors like? Which pages does not get a lot of traffic? Extremely useful information, and you can use these numbers to determine many things such as what kind of content does your visitors like? Which pages rank well in search engines? Which pages does not rank well in search engines? Most popular pages, Search Engines and Keywords & Key Phrases gives you the most important information about how well you perform in the Search Engines and how you can drive traffic to your site via SE’s
- Demographics
From which country or state does your visitors come from?
- Days of month and Days of week
This tells you on which day of the week you get the most visits. These and Time of day are very important numbers. If you’re a B2B company, and you get most of your visits in the weekends and after 5 in the afternoon, your web site is probably targeting the wrong visitors, because they are browsing from home.
- Referrers
Referring sites can be very useful. Is there a particular site that send you a lot of traffic? Maybe you should consider buying advertisement on that site.
- Search Engines
Simply an overview of which search engines are sending you the most traffic and how much. This is usually Google.
- Search Key Phrases and Key Words
An overview of which keywords drive traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!
One hit means every time the server gets a request for a file. That means that if I have one page on my site, but I have packed it with a million tiny 1 by 1 pixel pictures, I get one million and one hits (remember, one for the html file itself) every time a visitor loads that page. Doesn’t sound too impressive anymore, does it?
With a simple and free web stat tool (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#web-site-statistics) such as AWStats, you have all this information presented in an easily understandable format. By now you should have a general idea about site statistics, but how can you use it to make your web site more profitable?
One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.
Traffic vs. Sales Performance
Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave -- and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.
Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the
I have marketed many products and services online over the last few years. There are a ton of different ways to do it. Some are really useful and powerful and can get you a ton of traffic really quick to your site. These different ways range from the supposedly free to the very expensive.If you want to know the truth, just about everything takes money. Whether you are going to outright pay for traffic from one of the big three search engines or if you are going to spend your time doing SEO- it's going to end up costing you SOMETHING.Let me explain. If you think that you are going to optimize your site through SEO and build all the links yourself, that IS going to cost you something in time and opportunity cost. It's really not as 'free' as you might think.Sites for industrial products are no different. They need money to get going and you need to get your money back from your efforts. However, a pretty good rule of thumb is, if it's selling offline, then there is a good chance that it might sell online too.Large industrial orders can take months to finally place, and my research shows that a lot of the larger business to business buyers use the web for research first and then to place an order second. Large scale purchases need more upfront information for o
Defining the KPI for a web page can be hard, but is extremely important for measuring how efficient your web site really is. One of the most important KPI’s for SEO Bomb is how many visitors get in touch with me and ask about SEO services for their web site.
Some sites are simply about branding and promoting a certain product. Take Coca Cola for example. They sell all their products in stores, yet they have spent quite a few dollars on their website, and must have an incredibly advanced tracking system for their sites success.
The Web Stats Program
After having defined your KPIs, how do you measure it? You need a Web Site Stat program, and these come in many, many flavours -- from the simplest and most dreadful web based ones, like Webalizer, to simple, yet useful and free web stats like AWStats. If your budget allows it, you can go for the more advanced solutions, like ClickTracks, Omniture SiteCatalyst or Deepmetrix Live stats.
These are all awesome, yet fairly pricy solutions that will certainly give you control over your visitors. There are also programs that include a number of other powerful tools for SEO and Keyword Analysis (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#free-seo-tools), such as WebCEO. WebCEO is the program I use on my site, so I highly recommend it. The program itself is free, but the price for the web stats module really isn’t bad either.
Whatever web stat solution you choose, they must be able to show you the following information:
- Number of visitors
Simply the number of visitors you get. One visitor may visit your site more than once, so you need:
- Number of unique visitors
The number of unique visitors.
- Visits per user
This number tells you how many times each visitor visits your web site
- Time spent on site per user
Also referred to as "stickiness". What this number basically mean is how long the visitors stay on your site.
- Most popular pages
Which pages does your visitors like? Which pages does not get a lot of traffic? Extremely useful information, and you can use these numbers to determine many things such as what kind of content does your visitors like? Which pages rank well in search engines? Which pages does not rank well in search engines? Most popular pages, Search Engines and Keywords & Key Phrases gives you the most important information about how well you perform in the Search Engines and how you can drive traffic to your site via SE’s
- Demographics
From which country or state does your visitors come from?
- Days of month and Days of week
This tells you on which day of the week you get the most visits. These and Time of day are very important numbers. If you’re a B2B company, and you get most of your visits in the weekends and after 5 in the afternoon, your web site is probably targeting the wrong visitors, because they are browsing from home.
- Referrers
Referring sites can be very useful. Is there a particular site that send you a lot of traffic? Maybe you should consider buying advertisement on that site.
- Search Engines
Simply an overview of which search engines are sending you the most traffic and how much. This is usually Google.
- Search Key Phrases and Key Words
An overview of which keywords drive traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!
One hit means every time the server gets a request for a file. That means that if I have one page on my site, but I have packed it with a million tiny 1 by 1 pixel pictures, I get one million and one hits (remember, one for the html file itself) every time a visitor loads that page. Doesn’t sound too impressive anymore, does it?
With a simple and free web stat tool (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#web-site-statistics) such as AWStats, you have all this information presented in an easily understandable format. By now you should have a general idea about site statistics, but how can you use it to make your web site more profitable?
One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.
Traffic vs. Sales Performance
Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave -- and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.
Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the
Why do so many affiliate marketers fail?Ask any program owner who uses affiliates to sell his product and they will tell you the same thing over and over – 20% of their affiliates make 80% of their sales.Actually the ratio is probably much worse than that, more like 10% make 90%.So again, why do so many fail?It’s because they don’t know the secret of making money as an affiliate. Actually that’s not fight at all, because there isn’t any secret at all, it’s just common sense, and it just needs someone like me writing this article to remind you of the obvious.The main cause of affiliate failure is that it is free to become an affiliate.Thus there is no incentive to put in the time, effort and money required to make it work because it hasn’t cost you anything.In my experience that most people situation (including me!) thought all they had to do was join several affiliate programs (the more the better) and wait for the cash to roll in.When that doesn't happen, they get frustrated, and disillusionment sets in.Let me tell you a story from my own experience. I was looking at making money on the net, and joined every free thing going. I was then so overwhelmed with emails welcoming me to this or that that I didn’t do anything. I actually found myself joining progra
Whatever web stat solution you choose, they must be able to show you the following information:
- Number of visitors
Simply the number of visitors you get. One visitor may visit your site more than once, so you need:
- Number of unique visitors
The number of unique visitors.
- Visits per user
This number tells you how many times each visitor visits your web site
- Time spent on site per user
Also referred to as "stickiness". What this number basically mean is how long the visitors stay on your site.
- Most popular pages
Which pages does your visitors like? Which pages does not get a lot of traffic? Extremely useful information, and you can use these numbers to determine many things such as what kind of content does your visitors like? Which pages rank well in search engines? Which pages does not rank well in search engines? Most popular pages, Search Engines and Keywords & Key Phrases gives you the most important information about how well you perform in the Search Engines and how you can drive traffic to your site via SE’s
- Demographics
From which country or state does your visitors come from?
- Days of month and Days of week
This tells you on which day of the week you get the most visits. These and Time of day are very important numbers. If you’re a B2B company, and you get most of your visits in the weekends and after 5 in the afternoon, your web site is probably targeting the wrong visitors, because they are browsing from home.
- Referrers
Referring sites can be very useful. Is there a particular site that send you a lot of traffic? Maybe you should consider buying advertisement on that site.
- Search Engines
Simply an overview of which search engines are sending you the most traffic and how much. This is usually Google.
- Search Key Phrases and Key Words
An overview of which keywords drive traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!
One hit means every time the server gets a request for a file. That means that if I have one page on my site, but I have packed it with a million tiny 1 by 1 pixel pictures, I get one million and one hits (remember, one for the html file itself) every time a visitor loads that page. Doesn’t sound too impressive anymore, does it?
With a simple and free web stat tool (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#web-site-statistics) such as AWStats, you have all this information presented in an easily understandable format. By now you should have a general idea about site statistics, but how can you use it to make your web site more profitable?
One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.
Traffic vs. Sales Performance
Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave -- and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.
Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the
There are a number of issues to consider:Blocks to creativity and organisational cultureWhat are the blocks to creativity and how can they be overcome? We can all be more creative, so what is stopping us? There are many blocks such as evaluation apprehension (in its many forms) and lack of adequate finance and resources. Separating creative from critical thinking, incremental productivity, tools that draw out tacit knowledge and using frameworks to trigger flow are some of the effective unblocking techniques. What is psychological safety and freedom? What properties of an organisational culture cultivate productivity?Organisational structureWhat properties of an organisational structure most foster creativity? There are many reasons why an entity has a particular organisational structure: history, logistics, market segmentation, product line, strategy and so forth. It is often unreasonable to ask a firm to change its organisational structure, so how do we get around this problem?Group structureWhat is the most effective team structure? Many people who are acknowledged to have made great contributions to society have worked alone, but it is very easy for individuals to go "off track" and feedback is required to some degree, as well as other things. It is als
Referring sites can be very useful. Is there a particular site that send you a lot of traffic? Maybe you should consider buying advertisement on that site.
Simply an overview of which search engines are sending you the most traffic and how much. This is usually Google.
An overview of which keywords drive traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!
One hit means every time the server gets a request for a file. That means that if I have one page on my site, but I have packed it with a million tiny 1 by 1 pixel pictures, I get one million and one hits (remember, one for the html file itself) every time a visitor loads that page. Doesn’t sound too impressive anymore, does it?
With a simple and free web stat tool (http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#web-site-statistics) such as AWStats, you have all this information presented in an easily understandable format. By now you should have a general idea about site statistics, but how can you use it to make your web site more profitable?
One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.
Traffic vs. Sales Performance
Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave -- and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.
Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the
There are a number of things that I don't like about ebooks or written books that talk to people regarding technology. There are too many assumptions made about the people that are reading the publications.For the most part the authors and publishers are under an albeit false impression that everyone is a techno-wiz and that we all live and breathe every verse of every tech manual ever devised.What they fail to realize in this country especially is that the reading level for the populus is decreasing at an ever rapid rate. We in tech (I have been guilty of this as well) are not educating our audience. We're preaching to them instead of helping them understand what it is that we are trying to sell them or provide to them.Now while dumbing things down is not helpful either, adding some additional education to the prose is preferred as a solution to the problem which confronts us. How do we explain rocket-science in such a way that someone who's not Werner Von Braun can actually understand it and put the shields up so that the Klingon's don't screw us from our seats once again and drop us onto some forbidden planet.Authors...do something simple as add a glossary of terms for your readers. Educate them so that they respect you and laud you and tell all their friends to purchase your tomes. Not s
One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.
Traffic vs. Sales Performance
Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave -- and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.
Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the rest of the page.
The more interruptive banner ads you have on your page, the more this rule will apply. What do you do if some one yells directly into your ear? Of course you cover them. Internet users nowadays, and experienced users in particular, have developed what I like to refer to as tunnel vision -- they simply block everything but the content they’re reading. Sounds familiar? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were one of them. After all you’re reading a rather nerdy case study about web site stats.
Both SiteCatalyst and ClickTracks have a really nice feature that lets you open your site in your browser, and it will highlight the links that are most popular -- with number of clicks, percentage and all. Very nice and incredibly useful feature.
So how do you solve this problem? By adding links to the download page in the content of the popular page. Whoever’s reading that page cannot avoid to notice it, and it will drive traffic to the download page. One of my goals with my site SEOBomb.com is to share my page about SEO Links and Resources.
Just for fun, scroll up and count how many links I have to that section of the site. Did you already click on any of them? If so, I guess that proves my point.(And I hope you find it useful, because I spend a lot of time on it.)
Web Site Trend Analysis
Here comes the fun part. By following the trends over time, you get a better overview of what’s going on. On your site, and on the internet. I can tell you that most of the web sites I’ve been involved in to date gets the most traffic on a Thursday. It doesn’t matter what month or what year. Thursday is traffic day. Of course it depends on what business you are in, but I am confident this applies for most business sites.
Obviously, leisure sites will have a different traffic pattern. Take a online casino site for example. Chances are they receive the most traffic in the weekends and in the afternoon on weekdays. Chances are also that they are most profitable in the beginning of each month and in the middle of each month. Why, you ask? It’s pretty simple. Payday the 15th and the 30th.
Wild guess -- on which days of the month does it make most sense for the online casino site to launch a new campaign? In the beginning and in the middle of the month, of course. That’s when their potential customers have money available.
By looking at your web site statistics and by analyzing your target audience, you can tweak the performance of your web site. It doesn’t matter if you are a one man company, a mid size corporation or a Fortune 500 Company -- Everybody can increase web site performance and revenue by analyzing your web site stats and applying the proper strategy accordingly.
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