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Web Stats: A terrific marketing tool
By Zach Wilson, Gulo Solutions
If you are like most businesses today, you have invested in a Web site. Virtually every Web site generates data on a regular basis about how visitors are accessing and using your Web site. Most web hosting services provide this data at no extra cost as a part of your monthly or annual fee. If your web host doesn't provide web statistics that are easily accessible or understandable, consider using Google Analytics, a free web statistics package available at www.google.com/analytics.
A surprising number of businesses don't take advantage of wealth of information that web statistics provide. This tool gives businesses powerful insight into the effectiveness of the Web site and help make the overall marketing efforts of the business more effective.
To take full advantage of the statistics generated, you need to have a clear understanding of "Web Lingo." The purpose of this article is to explain the meaning of web stat terms such as "hits, visitors, bounces and pageviews" and how you can use this information to understand how well you are reaching your market.
Hits are meaningless
There is a commercial on TV in which two young men brag about having reached one million hits on their Web site that features Chuck Norris. According to virtually everyone in the Internet world, "hits" is probably the least meaningful statistic in evaluating a Web site. Alden Smith, an award-winning author on internet marketing says, "Hits...can be very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic for your website." According to Nach M. Maravilla, Publisher of PowerHomebiz.com, "Early on, the online industry has discarded using the notion of hits to measure a site's effectiveness."
He goes on to explain why. "Hits count the number of individual requests for data from a Web server, be it text or art. With a click, a single loaded page could account for four, five, even ten hits at a time. Hits made for seemingly impressive Web traffic numbers; but are a lousy measure for a site's growth and even advertising potential."
One misconception is that people who read their statistics believe that their total hits to the website means the number of users who visited the site. This simply is not true. A client once said, "we had over 750,000 hits last month." Our response: that's fantastic, but that tells you nothing about the visitors to your site.
Visitors are the key
The term that Web site owners want to focus on is the number of unique visitors/users/impressions generated by the Web site. Wikipedia defines a unique visitor as: "an identified client generating requests on the web server or viewing pages within a defined time period (i.e. day, week or month). A unique visitor counts once within the timeframe."
A visitor can make multiple visits and web analytics software will only count the user once, thus giving you an accurate count on your unique visitors and a much better idea of the amount of traffic the Web site is generating.
When looking at the web statistics generated for your Web site, pay particular attention to:
- The number of Page Views per Visitors? This is a good indication of two things: How many people are actually visiting the site and how long they are staying on the site. If that ratio is low (e.g. between 1 and 2), that is an indication that visitors are finding the site but leaving immediately upon seeing the home page. This typically is an indication that visitors aren't finding what they are looking for on your home page. It could indicate that your home page isn't clear about who you are and what you do. Or it is possible once they arrive at your home page, they realize that they have been there before and there is nothing new to entice them to stay and look further at what you offer. One solution might be to periodically and regularly add links to new and substantive content that will provide visitors with useful information.
- How many unique visitors are looking at your website. What is the percentage of unique visits to all visits? This will give you an insight to how well you are attracting new potential clients and the loyalty of current clients. This may be particularly telling if you have created a marketing campaign to attract new clients in a particular segment of your market. You would expect to see an increase in new visitors. If not, this may be an indication that the other aspects of your marketing to this new segment isn't working.
- Where the visitors are coming from. Are visitors referred through major search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo) or are they coming through specific trade or professional associations serving the credit industry? This can provide an excellent snapshot of how well your other marketing efforts are doing. For example, if you are engaged in a Search Engine Optimization (paid or otherwise), you will be able to validate at least in part the results claimed by your SEO firm. You can also see on a real-time basis, whether there are expected increases in referrals from targeted sources.
- Where visitors enter and exit your Web site. You might want to create specific landing pages that go hand-in-hand with related marketing efforts so that you can track how well those marketing approaches are working. If you have a particular message or part of your Web site you want to emphasize (e.g. limited time offer for services to attract new clients), you want to make certain that visitors are not exiting before getting to that page.
Be sure to review the web statistics generated for your site on a regular basis and compare them periodically. This will provide an excellent report card on how well your overall marketing efforts are as effective as you want.
Glossary of key web statistics:
Hits - A hit is a request made to the server. Every single file requested from the server counts as a hit.
IP Address - Internet protocol address.
Page -single page of a Web site, regardless of type of page.
Path - The path a visitor takes through your site when they visit.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator, a technical term for a web site address
Referrer - the web page that contained the link that visitor clicked on to get to the Web site being visited.
Views - each time a page was accessed.
Visits/Visitors - Visitors are identified using the IP address that is assigned to a web surfer when he or she gets online and is captured and stored by web stats programs.
About the author: Zach Wilson is Co-founder and Principal of Gulo Solutions LLC (www.gulosolutions.com) , which is a Chicago-based company committed to providing quality web-based entity management software and technology consulting services to organizations of all sizes. Zach can be reached by phone at (773) 276-8066.
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