People see massive 'hits' and think oh! goodie I'm there - wrong! Traffic does not mean buyers - learn the difference

I have a Stats package - what do I do with it?

All websites when hosted come with a 'stats' package that tells you basic information about who is visiting your site and where they go and how long they stay. Do you understand it?

First of all the stats have this big page header which says You have had 1,590 hits today, that's 120 hits per hour and you are thinking great - won't be long before someone orders from me...... or, Wow!! aren't I popular lets get some more stuff up there.Sadly, these hits are often just bots hitting your site, searches and automatic crawlers looking for information and your site is just one of millions it trawls through mindlessly every day. Every time it reaches your site and you have 30 items on your front page it 'hits' all 30 at the same time and this registers on your hit counter. It is, to all intents and purposes, meaningless.[tip] ignore this page for the time being, by the time it makes any sense, you won't need it

So, if that is rubbish stuff what is useful.

Well, if you take the time to understand your stats package [and there are many out there] you will find they all contain pockets of information in a well ordered list and sectioned so that you can with a little bit of thinking, actually track visitors through your site.

Firstly, a good place to start is Searches. You will quickly come to see this as a gold mine of information as when someone searches on 'fried widgets' and they find you it shows up on the search list, more importantly you can track which search engine they used by the Section dealing with that. Eventually you will determine changes you need to make to your SEO tags to take maximum effect of searches. This alone will help you drive business to your site [tip] talk to an SEO expert on 4N, there are a few and or £100 or thereabouts you will leap ahead on searches online.

Analyse your Visitors and increase sales

Secondly, there are, on some stats packages, an hour by hour average for the hits/visits and this can provide specific information about your users searching habits.

For example: your site sells kiddies wear and on looking at the visits you can see that your peak visiting time is after 9am and before 12 and after 3.30 to about 5pm. This tells you that mothers are visiting your site, after the kids are at school and after they have got back from school.

Besides this telling you that your target market is finding you it is also pointing out that there are exclusive selling options to hit the visitor at those times with a special 'today only' offer [order by 5pm to take advantage of this exclusive deal]. You are seeing 'Selling Opportunities' from statistics from your site - find ways to use them.

Look for Trends - and learn to anticipate

These same stats will show you accumulative information month after month giving you trends to work from and if you learn to interpret these then you enhance your online business opportunities. [tip]Look for shifts in visitors to pages that indicate they are starting to think of clothes for summer, or winter an change your website accordingly and then watch your sales increase.

Important piece of information in your statistics is the amount of visitors that are 'repeats'. This is important because the level of repeats increases the chance of initial and further sales. People who come once rarely buy, others who come back 2-3 times in a day are checking out your prices and people who do this often come back and buy when they are ready - THIS is your marketing having an effect. Is it price sensitive, did they buy, or did they go somewhere else in the end? - your sales will show the truth of that. [tip] Try and monitor repeat visits vs sales to see if your conversion is good, bad or indifferent, change a few things on your site and look for changes to behaviour

Look to see where they come and go

One of the most important areas of statistic packages is entry and exit pages. If they come directly into your landing page, and off again you failed to draw them. If they leave half way through the buying process you lost them - look at why.

Viewing exit pages can give you insights into what people think of your site. If they are looking at specific deals or products, and then going is there a reason? can you see a trend here?

Often people visit sites and never buy so, don't place too much emphasis on this but use it to try to build a picture up of your site usage and make changes that you think might make a difference.

Referrals are good for your business

If you can get other people to put links to your site on their website you will be able to see how many of their visitors activate that link. Also, [tip] if you write articles with links to specific pages, you can see how effective this and as time goes on and the links grow so will the effectiveness of your website.

An interesting check is to see how many people directly input the name of your website as these are people who have been given your name, read it, or who know you already and these people will often be buyers or returning visitors.

This is not the end....

All the information and knowledge cannot be put into one or two articles and there is a lot more you can do with statistics and a good webmaster can use this information to tell you much more than printed here and there are other areas to help you improve your site so look out for [4]Good Copy vs Bad Copy in this mini series of articles