Tracking your visitors

The web statistics and analysis of data available for owners of web sites to track visitors to the web is often an underutilized tool. While everyone wants to access their web statistics, usually do not know what to do with the information, or ask for assistance in data analysis.

Your webmaster should be able to tell you what the statistics mean, but the analysis must be done by someone with some experience in web marketing. That said, there are some important things any owner of a website to look at their stats should know:

Never heard someone talking, maybe bragging on how many "hits" of their website got last week, last month or last year? Do not be too impressed, more than likely you are misinformed. I'm just passing along misinformation to you because it sounds really good.

"Hits" is not a measure of how many people visited your site! "Hits" actually refers to the number of files from your web site have been opened during the viewing of pages on your site. In the case of one single page of your website is looking, more files will be opened. At a minimum, the HTML page is counted as a single file, as well as every image on the page. So if you have a web page with 3 images, you get 4 shots!

When you start counting the CSS, all the external JavaScript files, background images, etc., the number may be much, much higher. On my home page alone, there are 29 open files when you view the page.

The number of hits on my home page would be 29 times the number of visits. You can see why it is incorrect to use this number to talk about the number of visitors.

The statistic is to control visits, visitors and unique visitors. This number tells you how many actual people saw your site. Most statistics programs do not count the spiders of search engines as visitors, even if you count each time you visit your site.

Another figure to watch closely is the entry and exit pages. This will tell you, for each page in your site, the percentage of visitors who entered on that page, and all who came out from there. This can be valuable information to work your marketing strategies.

Bounce will be reported in many analysis programs. This indicates that a visitor came to your site through a page, then "bounced" off of it right back. What happens is that your site came up in search engines for a certain period, the visitor has clicked on your link in the results of the site, and decided immediately that the page was not what they were looking for. All we did during the search on the web. I look at the keywords, description and content to make sure that you are not inadvertently encouraging the page as something that is not.

After getting the bounce earlier, the statistical verification that tells you how long you spent on each page. Interested visitors will spend more time on your site. If you're interested in getting traffic but not sales, it is necessary to change the content to make the conversion.

Some analyzes give the navigation flow from inlet to outlet as well. Why is it important? Well, for example, when visitors enter through your home page, then most of them go to About Us page, and then exit, you have to do some work on the home page to get visitors to go to your product or service page. You will also need to look at the About Us page and figure out how to convert traffic to sales, or make them go to your products and services instead of leaving it.

Search engines and reference sites reference stats will tell you where visitors are coming to your site. The sites which refer to the link you are giving your input (an important ingredient for placement in search engines). Watch this stat to see what inbound links are converting into sales. Watch to see which search engines are good, and what you should pay more attention.

The statistics should also tell you what phrases are used to find your site. You will see they are working as desired. This is usually an eye opener for many website owners who have not worked with a web marketer. It may be surprising that key phrases that you can get higher rankings for search engines, and then discover that they are not what one would expect. This gives you a good overview on how search engines see your site and its contents.

Consider all the statistics and analysis as the gold that you extracted from your site visitors. Getting the gold from the earth is only half the battle. You must know how to convert to something that you can use. All statistics and analyzes are only numbers up to use it to improve your web site and sales. Keep in mind this is not a time trial, but an ongoing effort to keep your site visible and work for you .......