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
|
