What do your website statistics mean?

Are you someone who questions the purpose of your web stats report? When faced with a copy of your web stats reports, do you glaze over and quickly shove the document to the bottom of your in-tray?

If this sounds like you, read on. Web stats reports are crammed with facts, figures and jargon and many of us feel daunted by them. However, they give you invaluable information on how your website is performing and can help you make important investment decisions in relation to your online marketing. If you don't get web stats reports at present, ask your website designer to help you get hold of them. Good web analytics software is freely available and Branch Out will be happy to make a recommendation if you need one, just email Kate Barlow or call us on 01608 737653.

So, what do you need to look for in a web stats report and why?

1. How are visitors finding your website? This will tell you which strands of your marketing activity are working well at bringing you website traffic, so you can then invest more heavily in the most effective areas.
2. What do visitors do when they get to your site? Do they leave quickly (suggesting the site fails to capture their attention) or do they visit lots of different pages and spend over 30 seconds reading each one?
3. Are your visitors doing the things you want them to do? If one of the goals of your website is to generate enquiries, do people visit the Contact Us page and fill in a contact form? Similarly, do they sign up for your newsletter or make a purchase?
4. If your visitors get part-way through a process, such as making a purchase, find out where they are dropping out. Analysing one company's web stats, we were able to identify problems throughout the shopping process. Simply by tweaking the troublesome pages, we increased online sales by one thousand percent (1000%) within a couple of months.
5. Do your different visitor segments respond differently to your website? If you have multiple online marketing campaigns running, you can see which ones are most successful at generating new customers for you.
6. Which pages on your website are most popular in terms of the number of visitors and the duration of the visits? If you find that certain pages capture the interest of visitors, it can help you identify opportunities to create future web pages.

Obviously, if you are targeting different geographic regions, you will be interested to see which countries your visitors come from and how they react to your website. It's worth mentioning however that visitor location is often based on 'IP address' and this often depends on where someone's service provider is based, rather than where the individual visitor actually lives.

There are many more things that you can look at in your website statistics but picking off even a couple of the items listed above will help you to get a better idea of how your website is really doing. And this is an important first step in understanding how much to invest in your e-marketing and where to invest it.

If you are looking for more suggestions on things to look at in your web stats or if you would like some independent strategic advice on any other aspect of your e-marketing plans, please call us on 01608 737653 or email me, Kate Barlow, for a free, confidential and independent conversation.

Kind regards,

Kate Barlow

You may copy or distribute this newsletter as long as this copyright notice and full information about contacting the author are attached. The author is: Kate Barlow of Branch Out Internet Marketing, The Paddocks, Lower Nill Farm, Hook Norton, OX15 5DG, UK. Contact kate.barlow@branchout-internetmarketing.com or Tel: 01608 737653, Fax: 01608 737653.

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