A website owner would know the significance of web analytics. You need to keep a track of number of people visiting your website, to do well with your website. To be able to do it, you would need a web analytics tool. One option would be to read through the log file. It is however a huge hard work to review the log book manually, for there may be so many records in it. For this reason, a web analytics tool is the right choice for you. With this tool, you would get clear and simple reports about your website traffic flow. You must know how to proceed with your web analytics and below is your guide to accomplish the same.

Firstly, you need to collect the data. In case you have a web analytics tool, it may well be collecting all the logs for you. You must remember to include all the parts of your website that may be collecting the data. Such parts may include CGI logs, Web logs, forms (email requests), and any other data that your website may be generating.

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.

Now that you have all the data available to you, in an easy to understand format; you need to start your analysis. This should be the most interesting part of your web analytics task. What you should be looking for is the trend in your web traffic. Following are some of the points to figure out the trend:

Do more visitors visit your site at a specific time? Which of your pages are the most commonly visited ones? How many pages does a visitor visit on an average? For how long does a visitor stay in the site? How much traffic do you get from the search engines? What are the exit pages of your website? Who has linked 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.

Your visitors must know what changes you have made to your website. For this, you will need to promote your website in a way that your updates are highlighted. Unless people know about the improvements, it serves no good.

You must repeat the above process time and again. This is in fact, a continual process that you must do.

Tags: Marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 1:37 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.