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| Using The Web Analytics |
| Written by Justin Harrison |
| Tuesday, 23 June 2009 07:44 |
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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.
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. Firstly, you need to collect the data. In case you have a web analytics tool, it may well be collecting all the logs for you. You must remember to include all the parts of your website that may be collecting the data. Such parts may include CGI logs, Web logs, forms (email requests), and any other data that your website may be generating. Once you have successfully collected the data, it needs to be transformed. It can be a tedious task to review the web logs manually. You would therefore need to transform the available data into an easily understandable format that can be manipulated. Most of the web analytics tools do this functionality as well. However, certain non-web log formatted data such as CGI may need you do the conversion. Now that you have all the data available to you, in an easy to understand format; you need to start your analysis. This should be the most interesting part of your web analytics task. What you should be looking for is the trend in your web traffic. Following are some of the points to figure out the trend: 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? Once you have completed the analysis of your website, you need to asses the reports and set new bench marks for the improvement. You must make action plans and execute them well. You may want to add more business ads to your hot pages, and promote the pages that are not very frequently viewed. Identify the weak points and improve upon them. Your aim must be to cash in on your strong points, and improve on the weak ones. Your visitors must know what changes you have made to your website. For this, you will need to promote your website in a way that your updates are highlighted. Unless people know about the improvements, it serves no good. 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. |