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.
To start with, you must collect the data. If you have a web analytics tool installed, it may already be doing the stuff for you. You need to include all aspects of your website that collect data. Such aspects include CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and other kinds of data that your website generates.
The next step would be to transform the collected data into an understandable format that can be manipulated further. Reviewing the log file manually could be a hectic task. A web analytics tool would serve well here, making it easy to convert the collected data into understandable data. However, if some of your data is in the non-web log format like CGI, you will need to covert it yourself.
With all the collected and transformed data, you can easily proceed with your analysis now. This is arguably the most interesting part of your web analysis campaign. You need to identify a trend in the traffic flow. Following points would help you do just the same.
Is there a specific time when most of your visitors visit your website? What are the most visited pages of your website? How many pages does an average user view before quitting your website? On an average, how long do your visitors stay at the website? Does your traffic come from the search engines? What are the most common pages that most of visitors exit your website from? Who is linked up to your website?
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.
You need to attract your visitors. Once you know that you need to make changes to your website, based on your web analytics, you will need to make the changes in a way that visitors notice them. Unless people know about the updates, there is not much use. For this, you would have to promote your website tactfully, highlighting the updated parts of your website.
The above process is not a one time task, but you need to perform it continuously. The task is therefore a continuous process, and needs you to spend time on it regularly.
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.
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