How To Use Web Analytics

June 23, 2009 | Filed Under SEO

by Justin Harrison

As a website owner, you would want to analyze the progress of your website in terms of who is visiting it and how many times. This information would help you improve your website. However, to fetch this information, you would need a web analytics tool. Although, you could find all such information the log file; it can be a tedious task to read through a log file that has so many records in it. A web analytics tool serves as an ideal utility to explain you the traffic flow of your website with simple and sorted data. Web analytics is a useful exercise and you must know how to use it. Following is the description of the same.

The first thing that you need to do is collect the data. If you have web analytics tool handy, it would take care of the same. You must ensure that you have included all the data collecting parts of your website. These parts could be the CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and any other data that may be generated by the website.

The successfully collected data now needs to be transformed. It is certainly a huge task to review the log file manually. You are therefore required to transform the available data into user friendly data that can be manipulated at ease. You analytics tool will do this functionality as well. In case you have no web log formatted data, such as CGI; your analytic tool may not help.

With the collected and then transformed data, you could start your analysis. This phase of the web analytics would interest you the most. You need to understand the pattern of the traffic coming to your website. Following are the points to check for:

Does your traffic flow increase at a specific time? Which pages get visited more often? How many pages does an average visitor visit? How long does your visitor stay at the site? How much traffic are you able to draw from search engines. Which pages act as exit points for your visitors? What are your inbound links?

You should now be setting bench marks for yourself. With all the analysis done, you know the strong and weak points of your website. You can now plan your actions and execute them to reach newer standards. For instance, you could add more business links to the pages that are frequently visited by the people, and optimize the lesser visited ones for more traffic flow. In short, you should work in a direction to capitalize on the strong aspects of your website and improve on the weaker aspects.

Your potential visitors need to know what updates you have made to your website. Unless they are aware of the updates, your hard work would go in vain. This certainly calls for the promotion of your website, highlighting the newly made updates, to attract the visitors.

You would need to repeat the above discussed procedure on regular basis. This procedure is an ongoing exercise that you must do always.

About the Author:

Justin Harrison is an internationally recognised Internet Marketing Expert and entrepreneur who has built up multiple 7 figure online business and consults to some of leading online brands including Amazon, BBC, AIG and many others.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Comments

Leave a Reply

About: Work At Home Resource Center

The Work At Home Resource Center was created to be a free online resource for people looking to start a home based business or just earn extra money by working at home.