Analyze Your Website Activity To Improve Its Efficiency
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
In an episode of the hit TV series, Desperate Housewives, one of the lead characters tried to explain the neighborhood’s fascination about a seeming suicide case of one of their own. She said that their curiosity is piqued by the ultimate taboo: finding out what your neighbors do inside their own houses. Well, not all manners of spying belong to the realm of the perverse. Some form of “voyeurism” could actually help us in our respective fields.
Take the case of visitor spying in Internet marketing. No, no, no… you’re not expected to pry on the personal details of people who come to visit your site. Only, a peek into their activities while visiting our web pages would greatly aid us in determining whether or not the business model we have adapted is actually working or not.
You see, what our visitors do while in our website would reveal a lot about the efficiency of our web design. Are they going where we want them to go? More specifically, are they clicking what we want them to click? Are they reading what we want them to read? Are they coming from where we expect them to come from? Knowledge of these information would go a long, long way in helping us make some adjustments, whenever such is demanded.
There are many tools that would make this possible. Most web hosting services have traffic analyzers that would deliver for us some useful statistics about our visitors. But more often than not, these are quite wanting as they only show basic numerical facts that are not quite as thorough as what we need. It would be best to invest on more powerful tools that would give you a comprehensive report of your visitor’s activities in your web pages. There are quite a number of these programs available in the market today.
Here are the useful facts that a good spying tool would be able to provide:
* Number of unique visitors to your site. Unique visitors are those who visit your pages for the first time. If you’re consistently getting a good number of them, then your marketing plan is on the right track.
* Number of repeat visitors. Good spying tools would be able to pinpoint recurring IP addresses, hence, they will be able to determine who are new visitors and who are returning ones. If you are consistently attracting a good number of repeat visitors, then something in your site is actually good enough to keep them coming back.
* Amount of time each visitor spends in your site. This would tell you if your web pages are interesting enough to sustain the fascination of those who get to view them. The longer they stay in your site, the more it means that your pages are quite enchanting.
* Referring URLs for each visitor. A good spying tool would be able to tell you from what site a visitor came from before visiting a web page of yours. This would inform you if the focus of your marketing plan is correct. If more visitors are coming from areas that are not covered by your marketing campaign, then perhaps a shift in focus is necessary.
* Each visitor’s exit link. You will also get to know where your visitors go to after gracing your pages. This knowledge would prove invaluable in predicting their behavioral pattern. Knowledge is half the battle won, so they say, and you could make some corresponding adjustments to keep them longer in your site.
* The links your visitors click while in your site. Are your visitors going where you want them to go? This is likewise an invaluable knowledge, especially for websites that are enrolled with the Google AdSense program. You’ll be able to find our which ad links are performing and which are not. Thereafter, you could simply filter out the ad links that aren’t doing well, and reserve valuable real estate in your site for ad links that are more promising.
Knowing what you’re doing right and knowing what you’re doing incorrectly are requisites of sustainable success. In every endeavor, we should always strive to improve ourselves, and this maxim is likewise true for business. Only in knowing can we make the necessary tweaks that could bring our enterprise to the next level. Truly, analyzing our website’s activities is an essential step towards online prosperity.
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 8:46 AM,
