Is anyone visiting my web site? by Fernando Maci
Is your web site performing as you expected? Do you know who visits your site
and how often? What is the nature of their visits? Where do your visitors come
from? What other web sites or search engines are referring visitors to your
site? What web pages interest your visitors the most and which ones attract
less attention? As a teaching consultant of On-line Marketing courses, I
frequently formulate similar questions to audiences that generally include
sales directors and marketing executives from medium and large size companies.
My listeners are always amazed when they realize that even though their
companies are investing large sums of money to conduct market studies or
purchase marketing results (e.g. Nielsen) to learn about their client's
preferences, they are not taking advantage of analyzing and interpreting the
data from their own web traffic statistics. The differences between the two
primary sets of web traffic statistics -server activity analysis and real-time
statistics via script controls and cookies- have already been covered in a
former write-up (see "What is behind all those web traffic reports", 9/2/03).
This article will now focus on those pieces of information, contained in a web
traffic report, that are of most interest from a Marketing perspective. After
learning where to look and how to interpret the data, one will feel more
encouraged to embark in the apparently arduous task of interpreting web traffic
statistics. Our prize at the end will be a significant increase in web site
performance, greater traffic, better search engine positioning and a deeper
understanding of the expectations and interests of our web visitors. All this
combined can translate into additional sales, more registered users and a
larger amount of frequent users. Let's explore what we need to consider first.
Web Traffic Hits, visited pages, number of sessions. Rather than being overly
concerned with the absolute values of these statistics that, incidentally, may
vary dramatically based on the type of software being used to measure the web
traffic, we should pay attention to the evolution of these values over time
while maintaining the measuring software the same. One can click on a weekly
or, better yet, monthly view report and the graph will quickly show whether our
traffic is increasing or decreasing, and a simple mathematical computation
(perhaps the tool automatically provides it) of dividing the number of visited
pages by the total number of visitors will tell us how many pages a visitor
views on average. Whether our traffic increases, decreases, or remains stable,
it will be interesting and valuable to see when a particular trend changes and
analyze if the change is caused by a previously planned action, such as the
launch of an on-line publicity campaign, the agreement to exchange web links
with other sites, or the start of search engine positioning services. Visitors
In this section, it is important to distinguish between unique visitors and
repeating visitors. If one of your goals is to sell a service or product
on-line, a high degree of repetition from your visitors will likely indicate a
high level of customer commitment to your service or product. However, one must
exercise caution when evaluating the number of unique versus repeating
visitors. If your tool, for instance, uses the visitor's IP address to
determine whether the visitor is unique or not, the tool will at times count
multiple visits from the same user as unique. This can happen when a visitor
uses a dial-up modem to access the Internet, since each call will likely get a
different IP address assigned. Conversely, if a group of users is accessing the
Internet behind a router or proxy, they will all share the same IP address and
the tool will count them as a single repeating visitor. If cookies, on the
other hand, are used to determine the uniqueness of a visitor, the data
collected will be much more reliable.
Other useful information typically associated with visitors is their country of
origin and their language, which may prove useful when considering
international opportunities or the value of creating a version of your web site
in another language.
Visited Pages Determine which pages are visited the most besides your default
page, which tends to register the largest number of visits since it is the
typical point of entry to your web site. Identify those areas of most interest
to your visitors. By analyzing the most common navigational routes, discover
how far your visitors click. If the report, for example, reflects a large
number of visits to your home page and classifies them as unique page visits,
it could mean one of two things. Your site is experiencing low quality traffic,
with visitors not interested in your products or services and therefore not
going beyond your home page, or you may want to consider redesigning the home
page, since apparently is not generating enough interest among your visitors
and thus, they are not navigating deeper into your web site.
The report will also identify the most common exit point out of a visitor's
session. Once this exit page has been identified, its design can be reinforced
to include new points of interest with links to other sections of your web
site. Sessions and visit duration This value tries to measure the amount of
time that a given user spends navigating a web site. One must be careful,
though, when considering this piece of information, since a visitor could
inadvertently leave a window, and therefore a session, open and minimized. This
would be measured as an active session, even though the user was not actively
navigating through the web site. In any case, a large number of very short
visits could indicate an erroneous positioning of a web site. In other words,
the web site is attracting visitors who cannot find what they were expecting.
Referrals and search engines One of the most valuable pieces of information
that can be obtained from a web traffic statistical report is the origin of the
visits. In other words, it is extremely helpful to know the web site that
visitors were navigating prior to reaching ours. We will be able to distinguish
between users who clicked on a link at another web site in order to reach ours
from visitors who clicked on one of the search results returned by a search
engine. In this latter case, the report will also identify the keywords that
were used to launch the query.
A large number of referrals will come from other pages within your own web
site, while the rest of the referrals will typically be from external web sites
or search engines. In occasions, you will also find visits from web based
e-mail services or directly from a visitor's Internet browser, indicating that
your site is probably stored as a favorite, or the URL has been directly typed
on the browser's navigation bar.
It is important to regularly track those web sites that act as referrers to our
web site, or those search engines that most frequently locate our web site with
a given set of keywords. A final word of caution: be careful not to click
directly on the links included in the report belonging to the referral web
sites. If you do, the statistics report page may appear as a referral to their
web site, and depending on the security of your server, your statistics report
page could be accessed by the owners of the referral web site. Search keywords
Search keywords are those words or phrases that Internet users provide to a
search engine in order to find new web sites. Phrases are typically more
valuable than isolated words, but both can be used to identify the interests of
your audience. In some cases, you may be surprised to learn some of the
keywords that were used to locate your web site as well as those terms that
were never used. It will be interesting to observe the evolution of a
particular term over time. For example, if your web site promotes real estate,
you may detect changes in customer preferences for certain areas based on the
number of search keywords associated with specific locations. If a location
rarely shows up as a search keyword, it may be a good indication that your
customers are not interested in real estate there. Likewise, terms such as
buying or selling will suggest the type of transaction that your clients are
looking for.
Internet browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions.
Finally, it may be helpful to check on the type and version of Internet browser
being used by your audience, as well as the type of operating system and screen
resolution. These are mainly technical aspects, but may prove very useful for
redesigning or optimizing your website. For example, a web site can be
optimized for a specific Internet browser or a particular screen size. At
times, one will notice that different markets will favor certain computer
configurations. Conclusion Web statistics provide such large amounts of data
regarding the activities taking place inside a web server that processing all
of it may become an overwhelming task. However, once you become accustomed to
locating inside your own web analysis tool or service all the values described
in this article, you will be in a position to properly evaluate the information
that is being conveyed, as well as observe its evolution over time. This will
allow you to take action and make the appropriate marketing decisions that will
maximize the performance of your web site. Soon, you will identify your most
important metrics, what you want to measure with them and the reason why.
Most professional web hosting service providers include some type of web
traffic control system for their customers. If your provider does not offer
this capability, you will be able to find equivalent services from other
Internet-based companies that provide web traffic statistics. After you start
receiving your traffic reports, allocate in your weekly schedule adequate time
to evaluate the information. You will discover soon that this invested effort
will start paying dividends!
About the Author
Fernando Macia is Human Level Commuications' CEO, a company with offices in
Alicante, Spain and Dallas, Texas. We specialize in web design, CMS
development, search engine optimization and traffic statistics data mining.
www.humanlevel.com
