Understanding Your Visitors:

Your website looks great!
You have had visitors!
You've sold products!

Congratulations ... these are major accomplishments in the virtual world!

However, It is not time to sit back and relax... It is important to know what your "sell through" ratio is (for your product site) in order to determine how effective your sales tactics are. You should test different headlines and different prices, and use different approaches for different audiences. Whether your site is a product or service site (free/advertising or sale based) you need to know how many visitors you have to your site! You need to know where your traffic and sales are coming from. This means that you need a good website statistics measurement mechanism.

How visitors are "counted"... at this point, there is no absolute way to tell one visitor apart from another. There are basically three ways that computers can track visitors:

1. Cookies
2. IP addresses
3. Membership numbers

 

Cookies... When a visitor arrives at a website that utilizes cookies, a "cookie" is placed on the visitor's web browser. The cookie uses an ID number to identify you as a visitor at that website. This way, the website owner can keep track of how often you visit their site. Theoretically, this means that all you have to do in order to see how many unique visitors you have, is to look at the number of unique cookie numbers, right? Well, this only works to a point. You see, some people disable cookies on their computers while others clean the cookies out of their machines on a regular basis (which means your website would assign them a new number). There also may be more than one person using a particular computer (i.e.. libraries, schools, labs, etc.). As you can see, cookies really do not allow you to accurately track your visitors.

Membership numbers... People log onto your site (password protect), extremely effective for certain FREE sites, and sites that are "in affiliate, or other web services". Also effective for paid on line services... used by adult sites, and paid on-line services. For most online businesses, this is not a feasible way of tracking visitors.

IP addresses... Each time someone connects to the web, they receive a different IP address. This is because ISP's (Internet Service Provider's) are assigned a limited number of IP addresses. So when someone connects online, the ISP assigns them a number. When the same someone disconnects, that number becomes available to be assigned to the next person connecting online.

Important Information to track about your visitors:

Page views... A page view tells you how many times a particular web page was accessed. One visitor could visit just one page on your site and then leave (oh dear!), or they could go through and read every single page. Page views also allow you to get useful information about the way visitors are accessing your pages. For example, if you expect your visitors to go from page one to page two to page three ... and instead they are starting on page one and skipping to page three, you might wonder why? And if it is important, you might do something about it!

Unique visitors... Unique IP address = unique visitor. You see here is that one visitor (unique IP address) will normally visit one or more pages (page views) resulting in anywhere from dozens to thousands of hits.

Where do you get this kind of information for FREE?

Reports from SiteMeter.com provide you with more than just the visitor numbers though - they will tell you where your visitors are coming from, what browsers they used, when they visited, and more. It's extremely easy to install and the information is all there.

It will only track visitors to TWO pages, it will tell you the reference URL, the page entered and the exit page. It will also give you a total of page views and unique visitors. You may choose to have your statistics page "public" or "private." This counter cannot be set ahead.... i.e.. Choose 100,000 visitors. You start with 0 and when you see a "site meter" on someone's site you know it is the actual number of visitors.

Here's the type of information that is available with the FREE SiteMeter.com:

• who your visitor is (their IP address)
• the date and time of their visit
• where they came from (i.e. who referred them)
• if they came from a Search Engine and what were they searching for
• how long they stayed
• the path they followed (entrance page and exit page)
• browser type, ISP, language...
• and more

With this information you can start to get a really clear picture of:

• where your visitors are coming from
• which of your advertising, marketing and promotion tactics are paying off for you
• how long your visitors are staying
• whether or not your visitors are following the "path" you thought you were leading them down
• which of your linking partners are paying off for you
• which of the Search Engines are bringing you visitors
• what visitors are searching for in the Search Engines
• what browsers people are using. For example,if 80% of your visitors use Netscape 4.x and you haven't taken a look at your site on Netscape 4.x ... you won't know what they are seeing.
• what operating systems people are using (Windows95, Windows98, Mac)
• which of your pages are the most popular. If you thought the marketing section was going to be the big hit, and it turns out the contest page is the biggest draw, you might want to revise what you have on your contest page to encourage more sales.
• What are the most popular days and hours at your site. Do you receive a huge surge in traffic starting minutes after your ezine is delivered?
• what page(s) are your visitors clicking out from. Do you need to redo these pages to keep your visitors at your site?

You may also get this information from your webhost (if you are using a paid server - free servers do not provide this information). Your webhost already has this information in the form of user logs. Many hosts give you your user logs as part of your hosting fee, while others will charge you for it. This is one of the questions I suggest you ask when you are choosing a good web host.

So the first thing to do is ask your web host for your user logs. They will stick these in a file at your site and you can download the information via ftp.

The bottom line here is that you MUST be tracking your entire website. With the information you get, you should continually be experimenting and testing - making improvements to your website your sales message! A website is NEVER finished and your traffic and sales can be improved!

Recommended Reading

Data Mining Your Website by Jesus Mena -- Data Mining Your Website will teach you the tools, techniques, and technologies you'll need to profile current and potential customers and predict on-line interests and behavior. You'll learn how to extract from the huge pools of information your website generates, insights into on-line buying patterns, and how to apply this knowledge to design a website ....

THE savvy way to successful website promotion; Attracting on-line traffic; Guide to top positioning on search engines by Derek Galon -- This comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself Web promotion and successful on-line business, can be your most valuable assistant on the difficult way to real Web success on a small budget. This is a book on Web promotion...