By Jacqueline Southey
workz.com
You've built a company Web site, and it does a great job of presenting your business to everyone who visits it. You've promoted wherever you can, and you've spent your marketing budget wisely. So where do you begin to find out how your site is performing?
There are several questions you'll need to consider: How many people are visiting my site? Where are they coming from? Where on the site are they going? Where do they spend the most time? Those are a few questions to start with, and there are plenty more where they came from.
The good news is that with a solid tracking system you can find reasonably accurate data with which to measure your site's performance. Follow the steps in our checklist below to help you through the process.
Understand Web Site Tracking Terms
First you need to know the difference between hits and page views. Are you clear on IP Addresses and the User Agent String? Make sure you know what you'll be counting before you get started.
Use Traffic Analysis Tools
The raw data about your site's visitors is there in your server's log files. But how to make sense of it? We'll examine the various options open to you that can help you analyze your data: from your basic hit-counter type reports to a more comprehensive approach using off-the-shelf software programs, outsourcing to a third-party, or building a custom-made solution from your own database expert.
Examine the Statistical Reports
Once you've got the reporting structure underway, you'll be looking at reports that will most likely break down into the categories below. We'll examine each one in detail to provide you with a firm understanding of the data in front of you, and steps you can take to act on that information.
Ideally, you'd have the email addresses for all your customers, and you'd be able to develop a customer relationship based on individual demand. However, it's more likely that your casual browser or customer on your web site will leave you only clues to follow rather than detailed demographic information about themselves.
Use your Web server statistics to pick up as many clues as you can about your customers. They can provide you with information on how many visitors the site is getting, where they are coming from, which pages they find most interesting, and which keywords they are using to find your site.
Total stats reports: Get a good overall picture of your site's activity and performance levels and use the information to track peak usage and identify spikes in your traffic from promotional campaigns.
Top URLs requested: Find out where your customers spend their time on your site and identify the parts of your site that are working best and the parts that need improvement.
Referrer report: Who is sending customers your way? Use that information to drive more traffic to your site.
Search phrase report: Find out the keywords that work on search engines to drive customers to your site and rework your site's keywords to get higher search engine ratings.
Most common browserused: See what types and versions of browsers your visitors are using and fine-tune your site design to match them.
Bad URL/referrer report: Links to your site that don't work make you look bad. Use this report to find and remove the dead links that are causing error messages for your users.
User domain reports: Examine the top-level domains of your users to understand where, both in cyberspace and worldwide, your customers are coming from. Then you can figure out how to get more customers like them.
One thing to remember as you mine your Web site statistics for nuggets of information: Take it slow. Make changes gradually to measure their effectiveness. Changing many things on your site at once is comparable to starting again in your effort to find the key to those stats. workz.com is the trusted information and services community that helps small businesses grow and prosper online.
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