Web Analytic Basics

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03/12/2008

It is important that you understanding how your visitors find your site, what they do on your site and if they ever return. This can be very helpful in fine tuning your website so that you achieve your goal be it better sharing of information, selling your product or generating leads.

There are two different methods for identifying these statistics of your ZeppOS powered website.

Webalizer:

The first is an integrated usage report called Webalizer this may be accessed by logging into your website and navigating Control Panel > Maintenance > Usage Report > Webalizer.

Google Analytics:

From the link above you may also find a link to Google Analytics (http://google.com/analytics/) this is an exceedingly superior web analytics application which is the best took on the market to track and monitor the traffic performance of your site.

The above tools will provide you with critical data including:

How are visitors finding you?

There are three main paths for visitors to find your site:

Direct Traffic Visitors who access your website by typing your URL directly into their web browser or return to your site from a saved bookmark.
Referred Traffic Referred traffic consists of visitors who access your site by clicking on another website other than a search engine.
Search Engine There are two main types of traffic originating from Search Engines, Organic (Free) and Paid.

As there are a lot to understand about the various ways traffic reaches your site I will expand on this in a future blog.

How do your visitors behave on your website?

There is a great deal of value in identifying the patterns of visitors on your site. Things like:

Average pages per visit How many pages do they view during a visit to your site?
Bounce rate What percentage of your visitors are leaving your site before viewing additional pages?
Average time on site How long are they hanging out reading your content?

These factors among others give a keen insight to the effectiveness of your online presence. If you have an ineffective website, all the Off-Page optimization in the world will not solve the problem.

How do they like the content offered in your site?

This answers the question of which pages your visitors find most interesting.

Top content This ranks the pages in your site by order of page views.
Content drilldown - shows you a breakdown of all the URLs that were visited on your site.

This will start to provide a better understanding on what types of content your visitors like the most which will also guide you to enhancing content on the lesser trafficked pages.

How often are your visitors returning?
Visitor loyalty shows you how

New vs. Returning visitors This shows the percentage breakdown of new versus returning visitors.
Visitor loyalty This similarly indicates the number of visits expanding on the returning visitors statistics.

If you are running ads or radio campaigns as a way of generating new traffic, it's nice to know if you're continuing to get new visitors. It's also important to know if the visitors you've already gotten to your site are ever coming back. Visitor loyalty shows you the same type of info but with more detail, so you quantify how often your visitors are returning.

What about Conversion rates for visitors on the site? How can I use Web Analytics to improve my Website?
Stay tuned, this will be the topic of a future post (I will be watching to see if you do using Visitor Loyalty)

Posted By: Rob Bertholf on 03/12/2008 at 6:24 pm with 0 Comments

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