Posts Tagged ‘how does awstats help me decide my website content’

Website Analytics: How to Analyze Your Website Stats

You probably get some web site statistics on visitors from your web host -- maybe in the form of an incomprehensible log file. If you’re lucky you might get a rough analysis showing how often individual pages have been viewed.

Or maybe you just have some sort of counter on your home page. You know those cool, free stat counters that you find on every second web site. Truth been told, not a very satisfactory measure of site traffic, and definitely completely useless in a business perspective

Defining What to Measure and What to Analyze: KPI

If this is as much as you do with the data, you’re definitely missing out on a lot of vital information which can really help you to fine-tune your site, steering visitors to those areas which you want them to visit -- like your order page? Every web site has Key Performance Indicators, or KPI’s. A KPI is a measurement of what you want people to do on your web site -- after all, your web site have a goal, a purpose -- Right?

Say your site is selling a piece of software. Your main KPI would be how many visitors buy the software or download a free trial of the software. Maybe you have a news letter that you send every month with offers and information about your products or services. One KPI would be how many sign up for the newsletter -- another how many that click the links in your email and visits your Special Offer page.

Or it can simply be one of the most obvious KPIs: How many users, how many page loads and for how long do they stay on your site. The longer they stay on your site, the more interesting your visitors find your site.

Defining the KPI for a web page can be hard, but is extremely important for measuring how efficient your web site really is. One of the most important KPI’s for SEO Bomb is how many visitors get in touch with me and ask about SEO services for their web site.

Some sites are simply about branding and promoting a certain product. Take Coca Cola for example. They sell all their products in stores, yet they have spent quite a few dollars on their website, and must have an incredibly advanced tracking system for their sites success.

The Web Stats Program

After having defined your KPIs, how do you measure it? You need a Web Site Stat program, and these come in many, many flavours -- from the simplest and most dreadful web based ones, like Webalizer, to simple, yet useful and free web stats like AWStats. If your budget allows it, you can go for the more advanced solutions, like ClickTracks, Omniture SiteCatalyst or Deepmetrix Live stats.

These are all awesome, yet fairly pricy solutions that will certainly give you control over your visitors. There are also programs that include a number of other powerful tools for SEO and Keyword Analysis ([http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#free-seo-tools]), such as WebCEO. WebCEO is the program I use on my site, so I highly recommend it. The program itself is free, but the price for the web stats module really isn’t bad either.

Whatever web stat solution you choose, they must be able to show you the following information:

Number of visitors

Simply the number of visitors you get. One visitor may visit your site more than once, so you need:

Number of unique visitors

The number of unique visitors.

Visits per user

This number tells you how many times each visitor visits your web site

Time spent on site per user

Also referred to as "stickiness". What this number basically mean is how long the visitors stay on your site.

Most popular pages

Which pages does your visitors like? Which pages does not get a lot of traffic? Extremely useful information, and you can use these numbers to determine many things such as what kind of content does your visitors like? Which pages rank well in search engines? Which pages does not rank well in search engines? Most popular pages, Search Engines and Keywords & Key Phrases gives you the most important information about how well you perform in the Search Engines and how you can drive traffic to your site via SE’s

Demographics

From which country or state does your visitors come from?

Days of month and Days of week

This tells you on which day of the week you get the most visits. These and Time of day are very important numbers. If you’re a B2B company, and you get most of your visits in the weekends and after 5 in the afternoon, your web site is probably targeting the wrong visitors, because they are browsing from home.

Referrers

Referring sites can be very useful. Is there a particular site that send you a lot of traffic? Maybe you should consider buying advertisement on that site.

Search Engines

Simply an overview of which search engines are sending you the most traffic and how much. This is usually Google.

Search Key Phrases and Key Words

An overview of which keywords drive traffic to your website via search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t listed the ever-so-popular "hits" in the list, and the reason is very simple -- there’s no point, and it’s a completely useless number when analyzing from a business perspective. Or any perspective for that matter.

One hit means every time the server gets a request for a file. That means that if I have one page on my site, but I have packed it with a million tiny 1 by 1 pixel pictures, I get one million and one hits (remember, one for the html file itself) every time a visitor loads that page. Doesn’t sound too impressive anymore, does it?

With a simple and free web stat tool ([http://www.seobomb.com/seo-links-and-resource-page/#web-site-statistics]) such as AWStats, you have all this information presented in an easily understandable format [http://ns3744.ovh.net/awstats/awstats.pl?config=destailleur.fr]. By now you should have a general idea about site statistics, but how can you use it to make your web site more profitable?

One way is to drive more traffic to your site via SEO, SEM or banner/text ads. The sheer bulk of traffic will increase your "sales". Let’s just call it sales, but a sale can be everything from some one signing up to your news letter, sending you an email with a request or a download of your awesome software.

Traffic vs. Sales Performance

Sheer bulk of traffic is always good, as long as it’s targeted, but how can you convert your visitors into customers? How do you optimize your content to make it more selling? With more advanced site statistics tools you can analyze user paths, track the movement of your visitors throughout the site, and by doing so, get a better picture how they behave -- and better yet, control how they behave and make them do what you want them to do.

Let’s use the software company again. You have a download page, and it’s linked in your main menu. You also have another page that receive a considerable amount of traffic via search engines. The only thing that connects these two pages are the link in the main menu to the download page. Some times, if the content on the popular page is really interesting, your visitors are so focused on reading that they do not look at the rest of the page.

The more interruptive banner ads you have on your page, the more this rule will apply. What do you do if some one yells directly into your ear? Of course you cover them. Internet users nowadays, and experienced users in particular, have developed what I like to refer to as tunnel vision -- they simply block everything but the content they’re reading. Sounds familiar? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were one of them. After all you’re reading a rather nerdy case study about web site stats.

Both SiteCatalyst and ClickTracks have a really nice feature that lets you open your site in your browser, and it will highlight the links that are most popular -- with number of clicks, percentage and all. Very nice and incredibly useful feature.

So how do you solve this problem? By adding links to the download page in the content of the popular page. Whoever’s reading that page cannot avoid to notice it, and it will drive traffic to the download page. One of my goals with my site SEOBomb.com is to share my page about SEO Links and Resources.

Just for fun, scroll up and count how many links I have to that section of the site. Did you already click on any of them? If so, I guess that proves my point.(And I hope you find it useful, because I spend a lot of time on it.)

Web Site Trend Analysis

Here comes the fun part. By following the trends over time, you get a better overview of what’s going on. On your site, and on the internet. I can tell you that most of the web sites I’ve been involved in to date gets the most traffic on a Thursday. It doesn’t matter what month or what year. Thursday is traffic day. Of course it depends on what business you are in, but I am confident this applies for most business sites.

Obviously, leisure sites will have a different traffic pattern. Take a online casino site for example. Chances are they receive the most traffic in the weekends and in the afternoon on weekdays. Chances are also that they are most profitable in the beginning of each month and in the middle of each month. Why, you ask? It’s pretty simple. Payday the 15th and the 30th.

Wild guess -- on which days of the month does it make most sense for the online casino site to launch a new campaign? In the beginning and in the middle of the month, of course. That’s when their potential customers have money available.

By looking at your web site statistics and by analyzing your target audience, you can tweak the performance of your web site. It doesn’t matter if you are a one man company, a mid size corporation or a Fortune 500 Company -- Everybody can increase web site performance and revenue by analyzing your web site stats and applying the proper strategy accordingly.

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Sverre Sjothun - Sverre is working as a Search Engine Optimization Specialist at Riptown Media with a specialization in technical SEO and web site performance and conversions. Riptown's ...

How to Make Money From Home – Analyze Your WebStats – Referring Sites

I have written several articles on Web Stats, I want to show you that it is important to review your Web Stats and to analyze them to make improvements to your marketing efforts. Your Web Stats will tell you how to optimize your other efforts like PPC and Article Marketing.

Remember to log into your WebStats...

a) Log into your hosting account's C-Panel

b) Click on your Web/FTP Stats.

c) Choose any of the Stat options, however I use Awstats.

Scroll down past the Visits Duration stats and soon you will see...

Connect to Site From or Referring Sites

This is the real meat of all your WebStats. This will tell you "from where" your visitors are coming. Review this list carefully and be sure that you have the appropriate websites sending you traffic.

For example...if your site is about "Inner City Gardening" then you're probably not going to get many sales conversions from visitors that come from HowToBuildABetterMotorcycle.com or EverythingInConcrete.com.

What you want to see are links from Google, Yahoo and the other search engines which will show your PPC campaign efforts and from the organic searches on those search engines.

You also want to see your social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Digg where your blog's social bookmarking tasks are at work.

Look for links from Yahoo Answers and from the forums you visit and post in regularly - these will be people who are following your link from your signature profile.

Also look for payoff for your work in article sites like Ezine Articles and GoArticles.

If you see sites that are not compatible with your product and it is sending you a ton of visitors then you will perhaps discount these visits from your sales conversion calculations.

These links are not bad for you in the sense that the search engine spiders will visit those other sites and see your backlink and visit your site more often - this will even help you rise in the organic searches if the backlink is from a high page-ranking site. However, these types of visits may not turn into a lot of sales.

You want to concentrate your efforts into getting relevant links from writing articles, posting in forums, posting in your blog, answering questions in Yahoo Answers, Yedda and other interactive sites. Don't forget to put your product in ClickBank and pay a commission to affiliates that will send their targeted traffic to you.

Use your WebStats as a tool but do not become too obsessed. This tool will help you quantify the time and effort you are spending on traffic generation. Like a freight train, your results will be slow at first but will build momentum fast.

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Alex Jenkins - Five years ago I was a successful sales rep for a company that had sales managers, sales quotas and even bonuses. I did okay but ...

How Your Site Logs Can Make You Money

I'm a busy guy. I own several traditional brick and mortar businesses, and I spend a lot of time online. Since last month I've been spending a lot of time working on this blog and re-orienting myself on the Net.

So every morning I let my four dogs out, grab a cup of coffee and toast a bagel, then run upstairs and get on my computer. Some days I need to be out of the house at 9:00 AM to get somewhere, and some days I have nothing but time. Either way there are three things I do every morning after looking over my emails. First I go and post an article to five different article sites. This ensures that a steady stream of new one-way links to this website is being produced.

Then I go to my RSS reader and poke around for a while on the forums and blogs to see what is going on. I keep a notebook next to my computer and write down anything that I think I can use later. Then I get to the most interesting and important part of the morning -- I go to my awstats page.

Awstats is a basic site log analysis program that comes with most host accounts. I've always wondered how accurate the hit counts and other numbers really are, but that doesn't matter because I'm not looking for counts...I'm looking for trends.

Reviewing and understanding your site traffic logs can help you make more money by tailoring your site to meet the needs of your visitors.

The first place I stop is my average page counts by day of week. I've noticed on AffiliateBlog that the traffic starts off strong on Monday, builds through Wednesday, then starts to trail off. There's a small spike Saturday morning, but it's a classic bell curve otherwise. What does this mean? It means that if I have something that I think is going to be well received I try to publish it on Sunday and get my pinging done for Monday. I've also noticed that my RSS Feed subscribership follows the same pattern. This all makes sense, because people start off the week strong and end it tired -- including me.

I breeze by the countries and note the flags because I think it's cool. Next I stop at the section that shows the robots visiting the site. I make sure all of them have been there recently (especially Google), and I make a note if it looks like something is not right. I recently realized that one of the minor robots had never visited, so I went to the site and submitted a listing. If you're curious about all the robots out there, go to Robotstxt.com and take a look. Make sure the major robots on the list have visited your site in the last month. If not, you need to get them there. I've noticed that MSN, Yahoo and Google (in that order) visit my site the most. You need regular robot visits to ensure your latest content is indexed and available to prospective visitors.

Now we get to the fun part -- the list of the most-viewed pages. This tells you which content people are most interested in, and which content isn't really making the grade. The most popular post on AffiliateBlog has been The Ten Top Paying Programs at Commission Junction This Week. Oddly enough, a similar post about Shareasale is much farther down the list, meaning that people want to hear about top paying programs, but they want to hear about Commission Junction as well. I always watch for posts that climb up the line fast, and I always take note of them to brainstorm another entry that my visitors might like.

I get some search engine traffic but not much, so I glance at the keywords. Judging by some of the keywords that appear there, this section isn't very accurate.

Still there? Okay...listen up. Here's where you can really multiply your traffic, find some compatriots to work with and get some terrific insights into the minds of your visitors. Move down to the section that shows the external web sites that people are coming from. Understand...this is where your visitors saw something about you and clicked on it.

Go through this entire list. I look for blog sites, web sites, social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) and forums that have not appeared before or have moved up fast. I click on the link and see where it leads. Then I see the context in which my website appears.

Just as I do for people who trackback my blog (refer to it in their blog), I follow each link, get an email address and send off a quick email to the person thanking them for taking the time to mention my site. Nothing fancy -- just a quick thanks is fine.

The responses I get back are terrific. I would say that a large majority of them (80% probably) are responded to with amazement that I would take the time to acknowledge their actions. But why wouldn't I? If someone takes the time to recommend you the least you can do is acknowledge that recommendation and be grateful for it.

I love the site list because I find out some really interesting things. For example, my trackback to Google's blog when they bought Writely was actually listed on the Google blog page and brought me some traffic. And I was on the front page of del.icio.us for a little while...long enough to get some hits that way too. It's really interesting, and it's really fun to go through. Sigh...I am a dork.

One last observation...I noticed that my bookmark percentage is over 200%, meaning that I'm getting more return visitors than new visitors. I'm sure I can cure that by PPC advertising, but I'm waiting until my site is redesigned.

My RSS feed list at Feedburner hovers at about the same range throughout the month, meaning that more people bookmark the site than sign up for RSS feeds. I've pondered this all month, and I've decided that a large majority of my visitors don't use RSS regularly. That's why the new crimson box at the top of this page has appeared today. I put together an email version of my RSS feed in digest form that I'm going to make available weekly.

So there's a ton of information out there in that log file -- you just need to go over it carefully and think.

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Matt DeAngelis - Matt DeAngelis is a serial entrepreneur who, as he says, has been able to accomplish everything he has always wanted to do. Some highlights: working ...