Web Analytics: Who is visiting your website?
(As published in Greater Wilmington Business 2/2007)
In previous articles, we’ve discussed building a website as a key component of your small business marketing effort. Now that you’ve built the website, how do you gauge the success of it as a marketing medium? How do you track the effectiveness of offline promotions designed to drive traffic to your website? How do you determine what keywords visitors used to find your website? Web Analytics is the answer.
Web Analytics is an analysis of the people that have visited your website. Whenever someone visits your website, a trail of information is left behind like so many bread crumbs. Examples of this data include the location, duration, entry page, keywords used to navigate to your site, screen resolution, internet browser version and operating system type of the visitor.
The beauty of the web, and part of what makes websites like Myspace.Com so successful, is that with enough traffic you are able to almost immediately see the results of various online and offline marketing campaigns and almost instantaneously react by changing the content of your website. It is the most measurable marketing medium that exists, thus enabling you to more accurately build a marketing budget around your online campaigns.
Even better, many of you have web analytics reporting built into your monthly website costs without even being aware of it.
It’s important that you talk with the company that hosts your website and obtain a copy of this information on at least a quarterly basis to see how your marketing mix affects the nature and volume of the traffic to your website. For example, when you ran that TV ad last month, did it result in an uptick of activity on the page outlining the services or product mentioned in the ad?
If you host your website at MyHosting.Com or 1and1.com, for example, website statistics are included with any website hosting package that costs $5 or more per month. To access web statistics on 1and1.com, you login into your control panel and click on the Launch Web Statistics link where reports are broken into Visitors, Geography, Technology, Pages, and Referrer sections.
You can either dynamically create each report, which can be time intensive, or have them all emailed to you on a weekly or monthly basis.
If, for example, the “Browser Version” report reveals that 66% of your website visitors are using Firefox, but you’ve designed your site to look great on Internet Explorer, you may want to test your website using Firefox. Also, if you designed your website for Mac users and you are seeing that 76% of your users have Windows XP, you may want to rethink who your customers are.
One thing curiously lacking from 1and1.com reports is a report on the keywords visitors used in the search engines to find your site.
If your website is hosted at Myhosting.Com, they use WebTrends.Com to compile a 71-page Word document of 45 reports that is emailed to you at your request. For example, I was able to determine from the “Top Search Phrases” report for www.PackageBusters.Com that “Sharp Sidekick”, “Clamco” and “packaging equipment” were the three most-used phrases that visitors typed into a search engine that resulted in that user visiting the PackageBusters.Com website. This shows me what PackageBusters products are in demand and might be a good place to start a “pay-per-click” online campaign to drive traffic from search engines to my website. (We’ll talk more about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, in next month’s column.)
If the company that hosts your website does not offer an analysis of your visitor traffic, or you want to test the traffic for a specific page, Google Analytics is a powerful and somewhat complex reporting tool that is available for free at http://Google.Com/Analytics. You basically copy a snippet of HTML and JavaScript code generated by Google Analytics, add it to the page you’d like to track and then Google Analytics captures and reports on information about visitors to that page.
For example, using a tool like this, I was able to determine that the Small Business Center gets 38% of its traffic from users directly typing www.cfcc.edu/sbc (called “direct” traffic), 10% from the City of Wilmington website, and 18% from the search results of the Yahoo and Google search engines. The high direct traffic means that my marketing mix of postcards, newspaper advertising, and brochures has been effective at educating potential clients on our website address, and the relatively low 18% coming from Google and Yahoo means that I should do more to get into the search engines.
In the end Web Analytics is all about learning more about your customers and refining your website so that it becomes the ultimate measurable marketing vehicle. Next month, we’ll talk about SEO, short for search engine optimization.
In previous articles, we’ve discussed building a website as a key component of your small business marketing effort. Now that you’ve built the website, how do you gauge the success of it as a marketing medium? How do you track the effectiveness of offline promotions designed to drive traffic to your website? How do you determine what keywords visitors used to find your website? Web Analytics is the answer.
Web Analytics is an analysis of the people that have visited your website. Whenever someone visits your website, a trail of information is left behind like so many bread crumbs. Examples of this data include the location, duration, entry page, keywords used to navigate to your site, screen resolution, internet browser version and operating system type of the visitor.
The beauty of the web, and part of what makes websites like Myspace.Com so successful, is that with enough traffic you are able to almost immediately see the results of various online and offline marketing campaigns and almost instantaneously react by changing the content of your website. It is the most measurable marketing medium that exists, thus enabling you to more accurately build a marketing budget around your online campaigns.
Even better, many of you have web analytics reporting built into your monthly website costs without even being aware of it.
It’s important that you talk with the company that hosts your website and obtain a copy of this information on at least a quarterly basis to see how your marketing mix affects the nature and volume of the traffic to your website. For example, when you ran that TV ad last month, did it result in an uptick of activity on the page outlining the services or product mentioned in the ad?
If you host your website at MyHosting.Com or 1and1.com, for example, website statistics are included with any website hosting package that costs $5 or more per month. To access web statistics on 1and1.com, you login into your control panel and click on the Launch Web Statistics link where reports are broken into Visitors, Geography, Technology, Pages, and Referrer sections.
You can either dynamically create each report, which can be time intensive, or have them all emailed to you on a weekly or monthly basis.
If, for example, the “Browser Version” report reveals that 66% of your website visitors are using Firefox, but you’ve designed your site to look great on Internet Explorer, you may want to test your website using Firefox. Also, if you designed your website for Mac users and you are seeing that 76% of your users have Windows XP, you may want to rethink who your customers are.
One thing curiously lacking from 1and1.com reports is a report on the keywords visitors used in the search engines to find your site.
If your website is hosted at Myhosting.Com, they use WebTrends.Com to compile a 71-page Word document of 45 reports that is emailed to you at your request. For example, I was able to determine from the “Top Search Phrases” report for www.PackageBusters.Com that “Sharp Sidekick”, “Clamco” and “packaging equipment” were the three most-used phrases that visitors typed into a search engine that resulted in that user visiting the PackageBusters.Com website. This shows me what PackageBusters products are in demand and might be a good place to start a “pay-per-click” online campaign to drive traffic from search engines to my website. (We’ll talk more about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, in next month’s column.)
If the company that hosts your website does not offer an analysis of your visitor traffic, or you want to test the traffic for a specific page, Google Analytics is a powerful and somewhat complex reporting tool that is available for free at http://Google.Com/Analytics. You basically copy a snippet of HTML and JavaScript code generated by Google Analytics, add it to the page you’d like to track and then Google Analytics captures and reports on information about visitors to that page.
For example, using a tool like this, I was able to determine that the Small Business Center gets 38% of its traffic from users directly typing www.cfcc.edu/sbc (called “direct” traffic), 10% from the City of Wilmington website, and 18% from the search results of the Yahoo and Google search engines. The high direct traffic means that my marketing mix of postcards, newspaper advertising, and brochures has been effective at educating potential clients on our website address, and the relatively low 18% coming from Google and Yahoo means that I should do more to get into the search engines.
In the end Web Analytics is all about learning more about your customers and refining your website so that it becomes the ultimate measurable marketing vehicle. Next month, we’ll talk about SEO, short for search engine optimization.
Labels: web analytics greater wilmington business technology marketing websites
posted by slidesage at 7:20 AM
1 Comments:
Hi Nice Blog .If your time is less valuable, then it is probably less worthwhile to web time clock .
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