You probably get some web site statistics on visitors from
your web host -- maybe in the form of an incomprehensible
log file. If you’re lucky you might get a rough analysis
showing how often individual pages have been viewed.
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!
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t listed
the ever-so-popular "hits" in the list, and the reason is very
simple -- there’s no point, and it’s a completely
useless number when analyzing from a business perspective.
Or any perspective for that matter.
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 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.
Sverre Sjothun
SEO Specialist and Owner of the SEO Bomb.com Blog
To learn more about his take on SEO, visit his blog SEO
Bomb.com - Explosive Search Engine Optimization
Sverre is a Search Engine Optimization Specialist with a
specialization in technical SEO, web site performance and
conversions and is working for one of the top 10 online gambling
sites on the net.
