Using Web Analytics

Measure Your Website's Success

Is your business website as successful as it could be?

You know whether or not you’re actually acquiring business from your website. But is your website performing as well as it could be performing? How do you know?

Measuring the effectiveness of your website is called web analytics, and the information that web analytics software collects can be invaluable in fine-tuning your website and website promotion efforts.

Simply put, web analytics track and report what people do when they visit your website:

• How many visitors? The simplest of web analytics is the number of visitors to your website, the number of times pages are viewed, tracked by programs called hit counters or web counters. Put simply, what web page hit counters do is log the number of visitors each page with your website receives. By monitoring these figures, you can use a web counter to give you a generally accurate sense of which pages within your site are the most popular.
  • While web page hit counters used to be prominently featured on many web pages – “You are visitor number XXX!” – this can be risky for business website: the web counter might show such slow increase in numbers that the results actually work against you!
• How long do they stay? Web analytics software can also track how long your customers stay on your website, how many pages they visit, whether or not they are repeat visitors, and so on. Information from these web analytics can help you decide which of your web promotion design options are most effective, and which need to be tweaked or replaced.
• Taking off from landing pages: More sophisticated web analytics tools can tell you which pages within your website are the most popular (often pages that have the largest number of external links or that respond best to search engine optimization tools.) Additionally, they measure and report to you which pages within your site generates the largest number of actions (sales, e-mail launches, etc.) All of which tells you which aspects and web design characteristics of your website promotion efforts are working best – and which are not.
• Testing, testing: Web analytics can also help you test market different web promotion approaches, telling you quickly what is most effective and what needs to be re-thought and re-worked.

Web analytics are invaluable for what they tell you about your website; understanding and utilizing the reporting generated from this software is key to increasing the overall effectiveness of your site.

Learn about Web Analytics from Network Solutions.