Analyze Web Stats

Analyze Web Stats For Website Success

J. Walker Author of Analyze Web Stats

"As you begin the process of optimizing your site, you will need the ability to accurately measure the results of your efforts. Please understand that sometimes this means leaving a page alone long enough to interpret actual results, and make adjustments as needed. If you continually make changes before you analyze web stats, you will not be able to effectively track what is and isn’t working for you."

ANALYZE WEB STATS TO VERIFY SEO TECHNIQUES

As helpful as our free SEO Training Classes are for most people, many members have found class much easier to follow, and have consistently reported higher success rates in the search engines by owning the SEO Techniques eBook.

Most people have found it most effective to print the eBook and place it in a binder so they can use it as a checklist while working through their site, page by page.

Please remember that it is important to optimize every page individually. Do not wait until you have completed optimizing your entire site before beginning to track your results. Once you are satisfied that you have completed each technique on a specific page, you will need to begin analyzing the results with your web stats.

INSTALL WEB STATS PROGRAM

As most of you know, I do not recommend using any form of stats that involves adding code into your pages. These methods tend to be inaccurate and rarely measure the actual stats needed to build your online business. However, I do firmly recommend using a quality program for website stats. The very best program I have found for this (AWStats) also happens to be free.

AWStats

www.awstats.org

Installing this program is not a huge issue, IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. Generally speaking, I can figure out how to do just about anything. To be quite honest with you though, I could not get AWstats installed and working properly without assistance.

For those of you that need assistance, we are very blessed to have Brian Bonini to help us. For a very reasonable flat fee, he installs and sets up this program for members of our group. If you need assistance with this, I do highly recommend contacting him by email.

BEGIN ANALYZING RESULTS

People often ask why they need to analyze results instead of just using actual search engine results as the basis for success. The answer is very simple. Our goal is NOT just making it to the top of the search engine results, nor is it ONLY to increase traffic.

We need to bring TARGETED traffic to our sites.

Once we attract the targeted traffic, we need those visitors to make a purchase.

By using the proper stats, we can help determine what is and isn’t working for us. We can also effectively analyze what may need improvement, or simply minor tweaks.

Each business will have different areas that they need to track and analyze. The following are some of the things that I watch on my sites.

Visit Duration

The first thing I like to track is how long people are remaining on my site. If I am having a ton of traffic, but they are not staying very long, it is a good indication that I am using a key phrase that may be too general. People are arriving at my site and quickly deciding that it was not what they were looking for. This indicates a possible need for an adjustment in the phrases I have selected. If however they are spending time on my site but still not making a purchase, it is a very good indication that my marketing techniques need improvement.
Key Phrases

I also carefully track which key phrases are bringing people to the site. This is essential to carefully track because there are times you may not see your exact phrase being used in large numbers, but yet a very large volume of variations of that phrase are bringing them to your site. Keep an eye on how many page views each specific page is receiving rather than ONLY the exact phrase used.
Page Tracking

I like to watch which pages people are entering my site on and which they are leaving on. This can help me understand if my site (each page) is written in such a way that encourages my visitors to keep looking.
Contact & Confirmation Pages

I tend to pay special attention to contact pages and confirmation pages. This can help quickly find a problem. Do the number of contact confirmation page views come very close to matching the number of contacts you are actually receiving? If not, you may need to check the filters being used with your mail servers. You definitely do not want to miss customer emails.
Search Engine Spider Stats

I also watch the search engine spider stats carefully so that I can quickly spot a problem. I like to know how many times each spider has requested my robots.txt file. Since the reputable spiders will request this file with every single visit, it helps me determine frequency.
Web Stats Error Reports

I also keep a close eye on error pages reported. Every single error report is not an issue, as some spiders will frequently go on “fishing expeditions", looking for common pages that do not actually exist on my server. I also may have moved some images causing error pages when folks are searching Google images. Most importantly, I can quickly find problems on my site, as good stats will tell you exactly which page is creating the error. This alone has saved me some serious mistakes.
Visitor Operating Systems and Browsers

A few times a month I like to carefully check the trends occurring in stats concerning which operating system and which browser folks are using. Different companies will attract different types of users.
- I need to know what users MY business is attracting. I want my site to work well with all visitors, but it makes sense to know the actual percentages of my users so that I know areas that need a special focus.
- Over time, trends will vary. For example, most recently I have watched a steady increase of visitors who are using the Firefox browser. This of course has run hand in hand with news reports of security issues with internet explorer. It has been enough of a growth that I need to make an attempt to verify that my site does not have major issues in that browser.
Referral Stats

I always keep an eye on my referral stats. If people have arrived from another site, I like to know which sites. If I have an unusually high number suddenly showing up, it is a very good indication that someone has “hotlinked” to one of my images. I do not want to lose a ton of time obsessing over this, but it is something I watch.

If I were to cover every single issue that I watch in my stats, we could fill an entire book. Although I certainly don’t want to obsess over my stats, tracking trends and issues just makes good business sense. It is not the day to day results that will have the most impact on your success, but rather what happens over time.

I WILL DEFINITELY SEE YOU AT THE TOP!

J Walker (a.k.a. "Cricket")

Texas Web Designer and SEO Training Specialist
Owner GNC Web Creations and Mississippi Photo Gallery

P.S. Many folks confuse hits with actual visitors. Hits are NOT a good indicator of how many actual visitors you are receiving. You need to know exactly how many visitors you are receiving, how many of those are unique visitors, and of course how many pages they are viewing while visiting.

Define: hit

As used in reference to the World Wide Web, hit means a single request from a web browser for a single item from a web server; thus in order for a web browser to display a page that contains 3 graphics, 4 hits would occur at the server: 1 for the HTML page, and one for each of the 3 graphics. Hits are often used as a very rough measure of load on a server, e.g. Our server has been getting 300,000 hits per month. Because each hit can represent anything from a request for a tiny document (or even a request for a missing document) all the way to a request that requires some significant extra processing (such as a complex search request), the actual load on a machine from 1 hit is almost impossible to define.

cpmcnet.columbia.edu/computers/html/glossary.html

Link to Analyze Web Stats

Analyze Web Stats For Website Success

If you feel that this article, has been helpful to you and that it may also be beneficial to others, please consider adding it as a resource link on your website or blog!

Link to Analyze Web Stats

http://www.gnc-web-creations.com/analyze-web-stats.htm

1and1 Web Hosting

Affordable Domain Hosting

Recommending a service is not something we take lightly, especially when it comes to a decision as important as web hosting. However, we have people asking us almost daily for advice in choosing a reliable web host. We personally use and recommend 1and1 to meet all your small business hosting needs. See our 1and1 Hosting Review.