I had an article in the Successful Sites newsletter this week
The Scoreboard
You're at a ball game... the action is exciting and goals are scored on both sides... everyone's cheering. Then you look for the score...no one is bothering to keep track of the score!
You'd be shocked and a little frustrated, wouldn't you? After all, it's a competition. Half of the fun is knowing who's winning- it motivates the team to work harder. But many people NEVER even look at their web statistics- the scoreboard for their site. They aren't sure if they are winning or not!
Today's articles are simple introductions to why you need web statistics and what they mean.
Why Track Your Visitor's Behavior
By Sally Falkow © 2004
Since web sites first appeared, people have analyzed what was happening on their sites. It started with simple counters on personal pages to track the number of visitors. Now we have sophisticated software that can tag and compare visitors from different referrers so you know exactly what they're doing on your site.
In the days of the dot com boom there was a perception that you could put up a website and millions of people would flock to your site. You could make a fortune in a year!
Sanity has returned and we are back to the tried and true strategies for real people running real businesses online. Analyzing your traffic has assumed a new importance. In fact, stats are THE essential tool to measure and manage a business or a website successfully.
So where do stats fit into all this?
Lets' say that you put up a website. You're not sure if you have the right content on your home page. You do get some business from the site, but it could be better.
Should you change your content? Without actual data and solid information it's all guesswork. Try this - oh that didn't work. Try that - I got more orders. Good! Let's put this on the site - Oh dear the sign-ups went down.
You have an idea why, but you aren't really sure. You need to KNOW.
What stats should you be collecting?
The biggest pothole in this road is to make sure that the metrics you use are necessary and useful to your business. It's not so much what you have, but what you can do with it. You need to work out what your objectives are and what metrics you need.
A one size fits all is not possible in web metrics. Knowing what you want to achieve, who your visitors are likely to be, and what their objectives are, will lead you in the right direction.
The Basics
The first number you need to know is how many people are coming to your site. Most hosting companies can give you basic metrics like this. Make sure you're getting a figure for unique visitors - and not page views or hits.
The next important stat is "where did they come from?" In most programs this is the referrer report. You want to know which search engines are sending you traffic and which other websites have a link that sends people to your site.
You also need to know what search terms brought traffic to you. Look for a "search terms" section for this information. Search phrases are more helpful than search words.
When you have a report that tells you what search terms are producing the highest rate of traffic from the SE - and you can track which of those are producing the highest number of visitors reaching your goal pages and taking that all important revenue producing click - you can adjust your keywords and your content so that you get more and more visitors coming on those terms.
Now we get into visitor behavior - what do they actually DO once they are on the website.
Behavior has always been considered the best way to predict future actions. If you can find out what your customer is doing, how they behave and how they buy, where they click in a website, what content they read, what they click on and which links they follow, you can work out how to improve your website to better meet their needs.
Finding a software program that can actively track your visitor's click path on the site is the only way to do this.
There are many on the market. Some are easy to use; some are very complex. Some are affordable for entrepreneurs; some cost an arm and a leg.
Depending on your level of technical expertise and your time and interest - you can buy one and install it yourself, or outsource it to a metrics consultant who is an expert in this field and can interpret the stats for you.
The investment will pay off. A redesign and rewrite based on usability and visitor behavior increases the results on average by 135%.
A simple program that is very affordable is www.webstat.com.
One that offers an easy to follow and visual overlay on your own site, so you can see the results on each link is Clicktracks
One of the most important stats to track with visitors is how often do they come back, how long is it since they were last on your site and what action did they take. This is called frequency and recency.
Recency is the number one predictor of future behavior. So having a way to entice them back to your site is VITAL.
Tracking your visitors is the way to a successful website.
Why does all this matter? Because it has been shown over and over that past consumer behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Past behavior is a much better predictor of future behavior than demographics ever will be.
Which would you rather know?
Customers are women, married, with school age children, earn in excess of $100 000, live in an upscale neighborhood, and read Cosmopolitan magazine.
Customers who are women, married, with school age children, earning in excess of $100 000, live in an upscale neighborhood and read Cosmopolitan magazine appear to be disappointed with our content, because a high proportion of them haven't visited the site in the last 30 days.
A visitor or buyer who repeats their behavior is more likely to continue repeating it, meaning their future value to your business is high.
Once you know data like this, you can do user testing to find the bugs in the website content and rectify it.
Learning about your visitors and using this information as a guide is the best way to make sound marketing decisions. It directs how to generate the right content and dramatically increases results from your website. No matter what web stats software you use, it can't help you if you don't review it on a regular basis, so make it a habit to start viewing your stats on a regular basis.
Sally Falkow is a Web Content Strategist, and author of WebSense and the Content Strategy Workbook. Sign up for her free web content teleseminar being held on April 29.
What's the Score? Basic Web Analytic Terminology
By Scottie Claiborne © 2004
Web stats. Site statistics. Don't run away... you need to read this! The very thought of deciphering site statistic programs sends many site owners running to do all kinds of tasks that are less painful and tedious, like going to the dentist or cleaning the tile grout with a toothbrush.
If you know what you are looking for, site stats are not that painful and can be a real motivator to improve performance. They are the scoreboard that allow you to benchmark your performance and challenge you to find ways to make your site convert at a higher rate; more sales, more signups, more participation.
Let's review some of the basic terminology you will find in most web analytics program and demystify it so that you know what to measure, what to ignore, and what it all means.
HitsHits are the most overused and misunderstood measurement in web analytics. In the early days, people would brag about how many hits their website got... today most people know that hits are not a reliable measurement.
A hit is any element called by your browser when it requests a page. A single page may register a single hit or hundreds of hits based on how it has been built. Images, external stylesheets, external javascripts, and other elements that require the server to pull a file to build the page register as hits. Since every page has a different number of elements, hits are not a reliable measurement.
FilesA file is a hit that actually returned data from the server. Not all hits return data. Cached elements and errors are examples of hits that are not counted as files. This measurement is not likely to be helpful to you either.
Pages or Page Views
A Page or Page View is a measurement of the pages requested from the server. This is a good measurement to keep up with. You can get a rough idea of the number of pages the average visitor views by dividing this number by the number of visitors.
Page views can give you an idea of whether or not visitors are finding what they need on your site and progressing through it or viewing a single page and leaving.
Sites, Unique Visitors, and Repeat Visitors
Sites and unique visitors increment your visitors by recording their IP address. This gives you an idea of the number of visitors to your site in a given time period. It's not entirely accurate as people visiting your site from the same IP address (such as people on an office network or on dial-up where IP's rotate) will be counted as a single site or visitor.
Repeat visitors simply takes that IP address and compares it to see if the same IP address has visited more than once. Again, a margin of error for multiple users on the same IP address will skew this number.
Session and Visit Duration
This metric tries to measure the amount of time a user browsed your site. While it seems like a good idea to measure this, it's not a very accurate measurement. People may not be actively browsing your site, but they may have it open. A visit may "time out" at different intervals, and a new session is started for the same visitor.
One thing to note would be a large number of very short visits; it may indicate your search terms are not very well targeted and people are not finding what they expect on your site.
Referrers or Referring Sites
The link a visitor clicked on to arrive at your site is counted as a referrer or referring site. A large number of your referrers will be internal pages, the rest will be other sites or search engines. You may also see some web-based e-mail programs in your referrer logs. Bookmarked pages and urls typed directly into the browser will not show a referrer.
Referring sites is definitely something you want to watch- you can tell who is linking to you and how much traffic they send, including the search engines. When checking referring sites, don't click the URL in your web analytics program... copy and paste it into a new browser window. Otherwise your stats page will then appear in their referrering sites!
Search Terms and Search Strings
Search terms and search strings are pulled from the referring url from traffic sent by search engines. Search strings are more useful than search terms...just because a single words are listed in the search terms does not mean a visitor found your site by typing in that one word. It's simply every word in the search strings listed separately.
Search strings can tell you a lot about your search engine traffic- Are there phrases there you didn't expect? What phrases that you did expect are missing?
Browsers, User Agents, and Operating Systems
Browsers or user agents and operating systems will tell you what type of browser and operating system your visitors are using, often detailing it to the version number. You may want to double-check to see how your pages render in the browsers your visitors are using. Don't get lulled into a false sense of security by a small percentage of users for a specific browser... translate that percentage into actual numbers. You may want to check again for browser compatibility!
This information will typically show you the search engine robots traffic as well; you can see how often they are visiting your site and how many pages they are viewing.
Entry and Exit Pages
This is an interesting metric- it details the top entry pages (the first page a visitor arrives at) and the top exit pages (the last page they view before leaving or timing out). This can help you identify the high interest pages and the pages where you are losing visitors.
If you can combine this metric with top pages viewed, you can get an idea of how people are progressing through your site.
The Basics
There are many, many things a web analytics package can tell you these days that are truly amazing. Once you grasp the basics of these measurements that are included in any web analytics software, you will understand better what you want to measure and why. Then it's time to trade up to a full-featured package that can give you that finely detailed information in the way you want to see it.
Most hosts these days have free web analytics programs installed- check your control panel for your sites and see. It's probably labeled as "web stats" or "statistics". The most popular ones are Webalizer, Analog, and AWStats. If you don't have a web analytics program installed but you do have access to your raw logfiles, try Funnel Web, a free log analyzer.
If you don't have built-in stats or access to your logfiles, get a new host! You really do need to review this information monthly or quarterly to see how your site is doing with traffic and visitors. Put it on your calendar now- start benchmarking! You need to know the score.
The Scoreboard
You're at a ball game... the action is exciting and goals are scored on both sides... everyone's cheering. Then you look for the score...no one is bothering to keep track of the score!
You'd be shocked and a little frustrated, wouldn't you? After all, it's a competition. Half of the fun is knowing who's winning- it motivates the team to work harder. But many people NEVER even look at their web statistics- the scoreboard for their site. They aren't sure if they are winning or not!
Today's articles are simple introductions to why you need web statistics and what they mean.
Why Track Your Visitor's Behavior
By Sally Falkow © 2004
Since web sites first appeared, people have analyzed what was happening on their sites. It started with simple counters on personal pages to track the number of visitors. Now we have sophisticated software that can tag and compare visitors from different referrers so you know exactly what they're doing on your site.
In the days of the dot com boom there was a perception that you could put up a website and millions of people would flock to your site. You could make a fortune in a year!
Sanity has returned and we are back to the tried and true strategies for real people running real businesses online. Analyzing your traffic has assumed a new importance. In fact, stats are THE essential tool to measure and manage a business or a website successfully.
So where do stats fit into all this?
Lets' say that you put up a website. You're not sure if you have the right content on your home page. You do get some business from the site, but it could be better.
Should you change your content? Without actual data and solid information it's all guesswork. Try this - oh that didn't work. Try that - I got more orders. Good! Let's put this on the site - Oh dear the sign-ups went down.
You have an idea why, but you aren't really sure. You need to KNOW.
What stats should you be collecting?
The biggest pothole in this road is to make sure that the metrics you use are necessary and useful to your business. It's not so much what you have, but what you can do with it. You need to work out what your objectives are and what metrics you need.
A one size fits all is not possible in web metrics. Knowing what you want to achieve, who your visitors are likely to be, and what their objectives are, will lead you in the right direction.
The Basics
The first number you need to know is how many people are coming to your site. Most hosting companies can give you basic metrics like this. Make sure you're getting a figure for unique visitors - and not page views or hits.
The next important stat is "where did they come from?" In most programs this is the referrer report. You want to know which search engines are sending you traffic and which other websites have a link that sends people to your site.
You also need to know what search terms brought traffic to you. Look for a "search terms" section for this information. Search phrases are more helpful than search words.
When you have a report that tells you what search terms are producing the highest rate of traffic from the SE - and you can track which of those are producing the highest number of visitors reaching your goal pages and taking that all important revenue producing click - you can adjust your keywords and your content so that you get more and more visitors coming on those terms.
Now we get into visitor behavior - what do they actually DO once they are on the website.
Behavior has always been considered the best way to predict future actions. If you can find out what your customer is doing, how they behave and how they buy, where they click in a website, what content they read, what they click on and which links they follow, you can work out how to improve your website to better meet their needs.
Finding a software program that can actively track your visitor's click path on the site is the only way to do this.
There are many on the market. Some are easy to use; some are very complex. Some are affordable for entrepreneurs; some cost an arm and a leg.
Depending on your level of technical expertise and your time and interest - you can buy one and install it yourself, or outsource it to a metrics consultant who is an expert in this field and can interpret the stats for you.
The investment will pay off. A redesign and rewrite based on usability and visitor behavior increases the results on average by 135%.
A simple program that is very affordable is www.webstat.com.
One that offers an easy to follow and visual overlay on your own site, so you can see the results on each link is Clicktracks
One of the most important stats to track with visitors is how often do they come back, how long is it since they were last on your site and what action did they take. This is called frequency and recency.
Recency is the number one predictor of future behavior. So having a way to entice them back to your site is VITAL.
Tracking your visitors is the way to a successful website.
Why does all this matter? Because it has been shown over and over that past consumer behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Past behavior is a much better predictor of future behavior than demographics ever will be.
Which would you rather know?
Customers are women, married, with school age children, earn in excess of $100 000, live in an upscale neighborhood, and read Cosmopolitan magazine.
Customers who are women, married, with school age children, earning in excess of $100 000, live in an upscale neighborhood and read Cosmopolitan magazine appear to be disappointed with our content, because a high proportion of them haven't visited the site in the last 30 days.
A visitor or buyer who repeats their behavior is more likely to continue repeating it, meaning their future value to your business is high.
Once you know data like this, you can do user testing to find the bugs in the website content and rectify it.
Learning about your visitors and using this information as a guide is the best way to make sound marketing decisions. It directs how to generate the right content and dramatically increases results from your website. No matter what web stats software you use, it can't help you if you don't review it on a regular basis, so make it a habit to start viewing your stats on a regular basis.
Sally Falkow is a Web Content Strategist, and author of WebSense and the Content Strategy Workbook. Sign up for her free web content teleseminar being held on April 29.
What's the Score? Basic Web Analytic Terminology
By Scottie Claiborne © 2004
Web stats. Site statistics. Don't run away... you need to read this! The very thought of deciphering site statistic programs sends many site owners running to do all kinds of tasks that are less painful and tedious, like going to the dentist or cleaning the tile grout with a toothbrush.
If you know what you are looking for, site stats are not that painful and can be a real motivator to improve performance. They are the scoreboard that allow you to benchmark your performance and challenge you to find ways to make your site convert at a higher rate; more sales, more signups, more participation.
Let's review some of the basic terminology you will find in most web analytics program and demystify it so that you know what to measure, what to ignore, and what it all means.
HitsHits are the most overused and misunderstood measurement in web analytics. In the early days, people would brag about how many hits their website got... today most people know that hits are not a reliable measurement.
A hit is any element called by your browser when it requests a page. A single page may register a single hit or hundreds of hits based on how it has been built. Images, external stylesheets, external javascripts, and other elements that require the server to pull a file to build the page register as hits. Since every page has a different number of elements, hits are not a reliable measurement.
FilesA file is a hit that actually returned data from the server. Not all hits return data. Cached elements and errors are examples of hits that are not counted as files. This measurement is not likely to be helpful to you either.
Pages or Page Views
A Page or Page View is a measurement of the pages requested from the server. This is a good measurement to keep up with. You can get a rough idea of the number of pages the average visitor views by dividing this number by the number of visitors.
Page views can give you an idea of whether or not visitors are finding what they need on your site and progressing through it or viewing a single page and leaving.
Sites, Unique Visitors, and Repeat Visitors
Sites and unique visitors increment your visitors by recording their IP address. This gives you an idea of the number of visitors to your site in a given time period. It's not entirely accurate as people visiting your site from the same IP address (such as people on an office network or on dial-up where IP's rotate) will be counted as a single site or visitor.
Repeat visitors simply takes that IP address and compares it to see if the same IP address has visited more than once. Again, a margin of error for multiple users on the same IP address will skew this number.
Session and Visit Duration
This metric tries to measure the amount of time a user browsed your site. While it seems like a good idea to measure this, it's not a very accurate measurement. People may not be actively browsing your site, but they may have it open. A visit may "time out" at different intervals, and a new session is started for the same visitor.
One thing to note would be a large number of very short visits; it may indicate your search terms are not very well targeted and people are not finding what they expect on your site.
Referrers or Referring Sites
The link a visitor clicked on to arrive at your site is counted as a referrer or referring site. A large number of your referrers will be internal pages, the rest will be other sites or search engines. You may also see some web-based e-mail programs in your referrer logs. Bookmarked pages and urls typed directly into the browser will not show a referrer.
Referring sites is definitely something you want to watch- you can tell who is linking to you and how much traffic they send, including the search engines. When checking referring sites, don't click the URL in your web analytics program... copy and paste it into a new browser window. Otherwise your stats page will then appear in their referrering sites!
Search Terms and Search Strings
Search terms and search strings are pulled from the referring url from traffic sent by search engines. Search strings are more useful than search terms...just because a single words are listed in the search terms does not mean a visitor found your site by typing in that one word. It's simply every word in the search strings listed separately.
Search strings can tell you a lot about your search engine traffic- Are there phrases there you didn't expect? What phrases that you did expect are missing?
Browsers, User Agents, and Operating Systems
Browsers or user agents and operating systems will tell you what type of browser and operating system your visitors are using, often detailing it to the version number. You may want to double-check to see how your pages render in the browsers your visitors are using. Don't get lulled into a false sense of security by a small percentage of users for a specific browser... translate that percentage into actual numbers. You may want to check again for browser compatibility!
This information will typically show you the search engine robots traffic as well; you can see how often they are visiting your site and how many pages they are viewing.
Entry and Exit Pages
This is an interesting metric- it details the top entry pages (the first page a visitor arrives at) and the top exit pages (the last page they view before leaving or timing out). This can help you identify the high interest pages and the pages where you are losing visitors.
If you can combine this metric with top pages viewed, you can get an idea of how people are progressing through your site.
The Basics
There are many, many things a web analytics package can tell you these days that are truly amazing. Once you grasp the basics of these measurements that are included in any web analytics software, you will understand better what you want to measure and why. Then it's time to trade up to a full-featured package that can give you that finely detailed information in the way you want to see it.
Most hosts these days have free web analytics programs installed- check your control panel for your sites and see. It's probably labeled as "web stats" or "statistics". The most popular ones are Webalizer, Analog, and AWStats. If you don't have a web analytics program installed but you do have access to your raw logfiles, try Funnel Web, a free log analyzer.
If you don't have built-in stats or access to your logfiles, get a new host! You really do need to review this information monthly or quarterly to see how your site is doing with traffic and visitors. Put it on your calendar now- start benchmarking! You need to know the score.
