Is your
web site performing as you expected? Do you know who visits your site and
how often? What is the nature of their visits? Where do your visitors come
from? What other web sites or search engines are referring visitors to your
site? What web pages interest your visitors the most and which ones attract
less attention?
As a teaching consultant of On-line Marketing courses, I frequently
formulate similar questions to audiences that generally include sales
directors and marketing executives from medium and large size companies. My
listeners are always amazed when they realize that even though their
companies are investing large sums of money to conduct market studies or
purchase marketing results (e.g. Nielsen) to learn about their client’s
preferences, they are not taking advantage of analyzing and interpreting the
data from their own web traffic statistics.
The differences between the two primary sets of web traffic statistics
–server activity analysis and real-time statistics via script controls and
cookies- have already been covered in a former write-up (see “What is behind
all those web traffic reports”, 9/2/03). This article will now focus on
those pieces of information, contained in a web traffic report, that are of
most interest from a Marketing perspective. After learning where to look and
how to interpret the data, one will feel more encouraged to embark in the
apparently arduous task of interpreting web traffic statistics. Our prize at
the end will be a significant increase in web site performance, greater
traffic, better search engine positioning and a deeper understanding of the
expectations and interests of our web visitors. All this combined can
translate into additional sales, more registered users and a larger amount
of frequent users. Let’s explore what we need to consider first.
Web
Traffic
Hits, visited pages, number of sessions… Rather than being overly concerned
with the absolute values of these statistics that, incidentally, may vary
dramatically based on the type of software being used to measure the web
traffic, we should pay attention to the evolution of these values over time
while maintaining the measuring software the same. One can click on a weekly
or, better yet, monthly view report and the graph will quickly show whether
our traffic is increasing or decreasing, and a simple mathematical
computation (perhaps the tool automatically provides it) of dividing the
number of visited pages by the total number of visitors will tell us how
many pages a visitor views on average. Whether our traffic increases,
decreases, or remains stable, it will be interesting and valuable to see
when a particular trend changes and analyze if the change is caused by a
previously planned action, such as the launch of an on-line publicity
campaign, the agreement to exchange web links with other sites, or the start
of search engine positioning services.
Visitors
In this section, it is important to distinguish between unique visitors and
repeating visitors. If one of your goals is to sell a service or product
on-line, a high degree of repetition from your visitors will likely indicate
a high level of customer commitment to your service or product. However, one
must exercise caution when evaluating the number of unique versus repeating
visitors. If your tool, for instance, uses the visitor’s IP address to
determine whether the visitor is unique or not, the tool will at times count
multiple visits from the same user as unique. This can happen when a visitor
uses a dial-up modem to access the Internet, since each call will likely get
a different IP address assigned. Conversely, if a group of users is
accessing the Internet behind a router or proxy, they will all share the
same IP address and the tool will count them as a single repeating visitor.
If cookies, on the other hand, are used to determine the uniqueness of a
visitor, the data collected will be much more reliable.
Other useful information typically associated with visitors is their country
of origin and their language, which may prove useful when considering
international opportunities or the value of creating a version of your web
site in another language.
Visited Pages
Determine which pages are visited the most besides your default page, which
tends to register the largest number of visits since it is the typical point
of entry to your web site. Identify those areas of most interest to your
visitors. By analyzing the most common navigational routes, discover how far
your visitors click. If the report, for example, reflects a large number of
visits to your home page and classifies them as unique page visits, it could
mean one of two things. Your site is experiencing low quality traffic, with
visitors not interested in your products or services and therefore not going
beyond your home page, or you may want to consider redesigning the home
page, since apparently is not generating enough interest among your visitors
and thus, they are not navigating deeper into your web site.
The report will also identify the most common exit point out of a visitor’s
session. Once this exit page has been identified, its design can be
reinforced to include new points of interest with links to other sections of
your web site.
Sessions and visit duration
This value tries to measure the amount of time that a given user spends
navigating a web site. One must be careful, though, when considering this
piece of information, since a visitor could inadvertently leave a window,
and therefore a session, open and minimized. This would be measured as an
active session, even though the user was not actively navigating through the
web site. In any case, a large number of very short visits could indicate an
erroneous positioning of a web site. In other words, the web site is
attracting visitors who cannot find what they were expecting.
Referrals and search engines
One of the most valuable pieces of information that can be obtained from a
web traffic statistical report is the origin of the visits. In other words,
it is extremely helpful to know the web site that visitors were navigating
prior to reaching ours. We will be able to distinguish between users who
clicked on a link at another web site in order to reach ours from visitors
who clicked on one of the search results returned by a search engine. In
this latter case, the report will also identify the keywords that were used
to launch the query.
A large number of referrals will come from other pages within your own web
site, while the rest of the referrals will typically be from external web
sites or search engines. In occasions, you will also find visits from web
based e-mail services or directly from a visitor’s Internet browser,
indicating that your site is probably stored as a favorite, or the URL has
been directly typed on the browser’s navigation bar.
It is important to regularly track those web sites that act as referrers to
our web site, or those search engines that most frequently locate our web
site with a given set of keywords. A final word of caution: be careful not
to click directly on the links included in the report belonging to the
referral web sites. If you do, the statistics report page may appear as a
referral to their web site, and depending on the security of your server,
your statistics report page could be accessed by the owners of the referral
web site.
Search
keywords
Search keywords are those words or phrases that Internet users provide to a
search engine in order to find new web sites. Phrases are typically more
valuable than isolated words, but both can be used to identify the interests
of your audience. In some cases, you may be surprised to learn some of the
keywords that were used to locate your web site as well as those terms that
were never used. It will be interesting to observe the evolution of a
particular term over time. For example, if your web site promotes real
estate, you may detect changes in customer preferences for certain areas
based on the number of search keywords associated with specific locations.
If a location rarely shows up as a search keyword, it may be a good
indication that your customers are not interested in real estate there.
Likewise, terms such as buying or selling will suggest the type of
transaction that your clients are looking for.
Internet browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions…
Finally, it may be helpful to check on the type and version of Internet
browser being used by your audience, as well as the type of operating system
and screen resolution. These are mainly technical aspects, but may prove
very useful for redesigning or optimizing your website. For example, a web
site can be optimized for a specific Internet browser or a particular screen
size. At times, one will notice that different markets will favor certain
computer configurations.
Conclusion
Web statistics provide such large amounts of data regarding the activities
taking place inside a web server that processing all of it may become an
overwhelming task. However, once you become accustomed to locating inside
your own web analysis tool or service all the values described in this
article, you will be in a position to properly evaluate the information that
is being conveyed, as well as observe its evolution over time. This will
allow you to take action and make the appropriate marketing decisions that
will maximize the performance of your web site. Soon, you will identify your
most important metrics, what you want to measure with them and the reason
why.
Most professional web hosting service providers include some type of web
traffic control system for their customers. If your provider does not offer
this capability, you will be able to find equivalent services from other
Internet-based companies that provide web traffic statistics. After you
start receiving your traffic reports, allocate in your weekly schedule
adequate time to evaluate the information. You will discover soon that this
invested effort will start paying dividends!
About the Author
Fernando Macia is Human Level Commuications' CEO, a company with offices in
Alicante, Spain and Dallas, Texas. We specialize in web design, CMS
development, search engine optimization and traffic statistics data mining.
www.humanlevel.com
Compare Long
Distance Rates
