Question: Can I check “Google Analytics” type information for any website? If so, how?
For example, say I wanted to check unique visitors, demographics, and page views for foreignpolicy.com – Is this possible for any viewer to do this?

Answer:

Answer by nosmirc flen
No. A good website admin will make sure you have to login to see stats. There are some that are available but you have to know the url.

Wtf? I can access the site at school. Help me please

Answer:

Answer by Michael from UK
Google analytics is a part of google which can be used to monitor site access. Sometimes it performs poorly, and sounds like that’s happening to you.

You can wait a while to see if it improves, or have your browser block that site, so it won’t load that content when you go to that page.

Choose the Right Technique for Website Analysis

One of the best ways of web marketing is to analyze the traffic that you already have in your website. Inorder to meet the expectation of the visitors of your website, you will need to get a clear idea about who is visiting your website, from where there are visiting and which page of your website they visit more. These information could be obtained by using different web traffic analysis methods that are available today. Web page counter, statistical package from ISP and Web traffic analysis systems or softwares are the main web traffic analysis techniques that are in practice today. Let’s see the difference between these techniques in the forth coming paragraphs.

The old Web Page counter

The oldest of the four web traffic analysis techniques is the ‘web page counter’. The web page counters may be either visible to the visitors also or invisible to them so that the website owners could only see the counter. These web page counters register the number of people who visit a particular page of your website. However, web page counter is a very basic approach to web traffic analysis. They are not great marketing tools for large business websites. They will be handy for personal pages.

Informational, complicated Statistical packages from ISP

If you are using a good and well known ISP, then you will be definitely having a freeware version of some popular web statistics package. These packages will create a log of every visit that your website has received. The log will be in either a webpage format or some other graphical format. Whatever format the log is, it will have some complicated coding, which has to be deciphered to see the details. However, this method does indeed provide a good amount of information about the web traffic.

Simple, wore detailed Web analytics and conversion tracking Systems:

If both of the above mentioned methods doesn’t seem suitable to you or if you wish to have a more detailed report, there are simple web analytics systems and softwares like Conversionstats available at affordable prices that will provide a broad range of analysis options. They show you which pages of your website are more popular, who is visiting your website more, which search engines are sending more visitors, which pages of your website indicate some error etc.

Unless you have all this information, it is really hard to meet the expectation of the customers who visit your website.

Having A Website Is Not A Web Strategy

“I have a website, now what? I really don’t understand what my website should be doing for me.” This statement, from a successful manufacturing company owner, was made during a recent “Introduction to Web Marketing” seminar held by The Net Impact. “I know it’s up there and I’m proud of it I guess, but what is your website supposed to do for you?” This comment caused a lot of conversation in the room and opened the floodgates to similar comments.

“I have a website.” another business owner said, “I just don’t know if its bringing me leads or not.” Another person joined in with, “I seem to be slipping in the rankings as well and I’m not doing anything different. I think this is affecting my lead flow. What can I do about it?”

How many firms have the same questions? From this encounter and similar concerns raised in other seminars, I would have to say quite a few. Most firms we see at our seminars have a website that is three to five years old. Many times this is a second or even third generation site that replaced an older or original site. Interestingly enough, the most often cited reasons for these “next generation” website efforts usually have nothing to do with marketing! Business owners in many cases dramatically change their website or build it all over again mainly because of a change in their core business or because they simply don’t like their old site. With the notable exception of e-commerce sites, sales and lead flow had little to do with their reasons for the creation of a new site or their selection of the web development firm that produced it.

Website cost vs. website return on investment

Many businesses are mistakenly more concerned about the “cost” in building their new site than they are in how they will maximize their ROI from the site after it’s online. The reason behind this is pretty basic. It is almost always easier to control a checking account than it is to develop an effective revenue strategy. Thankfully this, “I got a deal.” approach to evaluating the value of a website has been changing to, “I made a good investment.” Increasingly firms are understanding that their website should perform, it should generate revenue and thus be considered a business expense rather than simply a one-time outlay of capital.

Over the past two years we have increasingly heard concerns about a site’s marketing impact, lead flow and search engine placement. Why? The old standby methods of generating business and their primary approach to advertising for many of these firms; direct mail, print media and yellow pages ads, are rising in cost while at the same time they decline in effectiveness. Business owners now more than ever realize that their website holds great potential and performance is a necessity. Yet most firms simply put, have a website and are now realizing they need a web strategy! We see this changing environment regularly in our seminars. The main questions business owners ask us as they start to re-evaluate their web approach are:

1) What is my website supposed to be doing for me?

2) How can I tell if it is doing this (in example: providing leads)?

3) What needs to be in place to measure results?

4) What efforts are required to improve performance?

5) How do I determine my return on the investment I have made in my site?

These are all great and common questions that reflect symptoms of not having identified a strong web strategy. In these next few posts we will address these questions starting with, “What is my website supposed to be doing for me?” This leads us into a discussion of differing web strategies.

Determining your “Web Strategy”

Deciding the desired functionality for your website and thus the major part of your web strategy can be challenging. There can be an irresistible urge to “keep up with the Joneses”. Some firms create sites that are way over the top and overly developed way beyond what are really their genuine online business requirements. Like office space, an elaborate and expensive website is not always a guarantee of success. We urge clients not to let corporate ego or peer pressure determine their approach to the web. At the same time, without advance planning and market awareness, an underdeveloped site will cost you business and stature. As in most strategic planning, it is best to start with the end in mind.

What do you want your website to do? Not really that tough a question, the tougher question is how to accomplish that.

Today we will start with a most basic use for your site:

Is your web strategy fairly simple? Do you just need your website to reinforce your business card?

You are of course aware that after an introduction at a conference or frequently even prior to a sales call, many prospects will call up your website to learn more about you and your organization. If your business is face-to-face, your approach is personal and your market local, then your website may need to do no more than provide a source of information supportive to the “elevator pitch” you just delivered to that new acquaintance or prospect from the conference or other chance meeting. A site built for this purpose should be simple and informative but also should be authoritative for the decision maker you are about to approach with an idea or service.

If this describes your business, then following these guidelines may be enough.

* Keep the information simple – viewers want information about you and your services. They will go elsewhere for the weather, time, entertainment, inspirational messages or stock quotes. Give them exactly what they want.

* Keep the design basic – no one wants to see marching monkeys, flashing pictures or burning logos. Just because your developer can do something clever, is not a good reason to do that something clever.

* Keep the site current – information must be accurate and up-to-date. As importantly, feature your contact information, phone number included, prominently on the site. Don’t make prospects dig deep to find out how to talk to you. Also, it is very inexpensive, even free, to have an email service provider on board to provide that important stan@stantheexpert vs. stantheexpert@hotmail or other less impressive email address. And for all of our sakes, watch it with cutesy email addresses. You really don’t want to be remembered as ladiesman@yahoo or something similarly distracting do you?

* Make sure your site works – How does your site look in Firefox, IE7, Safari or on an iPhone? Do your links work? Is your “contact us” form in good working order? Simple, up-to-date and functional are the basics.

* Don’t be afraid to be authoritative – are you an expert? Tell us! Publish this on your site. “What do you know and how will it help me?” is a question that needs to be answered for a viewer.

* Use web analytics tools – even a simple site should be measured for effectiveness. What pages do viewers visit? How long are they on the site? Where do they come from? All good things to know.

This simple, user-friendly, authority site need not be overly expensive. If you stay local and do not need the search engines to bring traffic to your site, you can make periodic changes to the site as needed for very little expense.

So, let’s put this strategy to the five question test above.

1) What is my website supposed to be doing for me?

In this basic case, represent my business in a professional and authoritative manner for prospects and partners who check us out online! Provide easy to find contact information.

2) How can I tell if it is doing this (in example: show credibility)?

Be proud of your site! Ask clients and prospects if they have seen your site. Did they find the information useful? Make your site the springboard for a face-to-face description of products and services.

3) What needs to be in place to measure results?

A simple web analytics tool like Google Analytics can be quickly installed for free. Though far from perfect, it will give you general information about your traffic and visitors. It also has great help screens.

4) What efforts are required to improve performance?

In this case, very little. Make sure your information is accurate and up-to-date. Keep articles and information on services topical and current.

5) How do I determine the return on my website investment?

It is hard to totally evaluate the return in this case on a minimal web investment since you are not trying to generate leads just as it is complicated to determine the cost of not having a website. Prospects and partners want to find out about your business online. The site then should give you peace of mind that your firm, regardless of size, is well represented online for referrals, prospects and recruiting. Use your online information as a springboard for launching into a sales meeting.

In this most basic web strategy, follow the steps we discussed above and your website will represent you in the simple, professional and authoritative manner you really need in order to support your face to face client meetings and close those sales!

Related Web Analytics Articles

At some point you have considered website design and SEO. You may have even tried to design your own website with applying SEO and not reached the effect you hoped to obtain. Like many other online website design and marketing techniques, website design and SEO together can and does work, by applying yourself and comprehending which keywords your website is being found with, for more detail go to:www.the20seotools.com. by keeping familiar of tendencies in the industry and responding to them. With some fundamental awareness that you have previously been missing, you can open the avenues to new and exciting openings for profits that you have been absent from.

Website Design Plus Website Analytics Plus SEO Equals Online Success! Let’s begin with the presumption that you want more visitors to your website, to effectively grow your business. With 86.7% of Internet users using search engines to find websites [Enquire Search Study] it’s apparent that your website has to come up high in the search engines rankings, so you can get your piece if not most of those potential customers. There is more additional information than just

Getting your website a high ranking and implementing Analytics to your group of tools is what will help you get the most out of not only your website design and SEO tactics, but ALL your online marketing crusades.

Analytics, as distinct by Wikipedia is the measurable extent of the actions of visitors to a website. In a commercial view, it non-specifically refers to the measure of which components of the website work towards the business goals; for instance, which pages stimulate visitors your purchase of your website.

There are an immense number of uses for website analytics. Website owners can use it to estimate website function and navigation as well as measuring customer interest in different advertisements and marketing campaigns, or it could be used to construct replication of the “whole picture” for more detail go to:www.offline-promotion.com. of your website’s lucrative gains. We want to center our attention on website analytics for website design and SEO goals in this article.

Good keyword phrases are more competitive today than ever, it takes more work to drive traffic to your site, and once you do you have to quickly obtain the interest of your visitors. Those visitors are very valuable and are the result of significant SEO efforts.

Therefore, it is critical to understand how visitors got to your site (which engines are driving traffic and which keywords), and even more critical to discover what they do once they get there. You need web Analytics reporting to tell you when and where people are leaving your site, where they are spending their time and much more.

Whether you currently have a website and are running an SEO campaign, and simply need to add Analytics, or whether you are looking to start SEO and a new web design, now is the time to take action.

http://www.search-engine-premiere.com
http://www.sitemap-makers.com

Website Analytics, Your Website and Your Business

How many times have you looked at your website and wondered just how effective it is?  Have you ever wondered where the people that visit are coming from or what search terms they used to get there?  If you have wondered these things, you are reading the right post because we are going to look into the awesome world of website analytics and go over some of the key info you can gather using them.

Why do analytics matter?

Through analyzing website analytics, you can gather info about the activities of your website visitors which you  can then compare to your marketing actions, giving you a big picture view of what is going on with your website and how effective it and your marketing is.  Combine this info with information that you collect regularly about your clients and you can start to understand why your visitors do what they do when they go to your website, be it buying, calling or leaving.  As in any situation, the more you know, the better the decisions you can make.

What can analytics track?

In this post, I will be talking about Google Analytics because that is what I use for me and my clients and that is what I am most familiar with.  Using Google Analytics you can track over time:

Visitor Trends # of visits Referring websites (where they came from) Search terms used to find your site Location (down to the city) of visitors Visitor operationg systems and browsers Visitor connection speeds Popular pages Visitor time on the site, etc.

The list above is actually only a fraction of the information you collect on your visitors through analytics.  The beauty of it is that you can make changes to the site and compare the analytics results to the results before the changes were made, giving you a way to trend your visitor activities and really get a great idea of the effectiveness of those changes.

Where Can I Get Analytics?

Here is the best part of all of this, website analytics are free.  Go to Google.com/analytics, and sign up for them.  From there, copy and past the tracking code into the bottom of your website pages (right before your ending </body> tag), check your Google Analytics page to make sure it is working and you are good to go.  There are a slew of other website analytics companies that you can get your analytics from, so don’t think Google Analytics are the only ones.  I am most familiar with Google Analytics so that’s what I wrote on.

Analyzing the Analytics

If you need help analyzing your analytics, contact us right away because that’s one of the things we do and we do it well.  Call us at 210-373-7352 with any questions you have and we will be happy to help you.  You can also visit us at www.bigcloudmedia.com.

I hope this has been informative and helpful to you.  If you don’t have analytics on your site, get them and start gathering the info.  Information is powerful and the more you have, the more effective your site and your company can be.

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Top 10 Tips for Hiring a Website Design Company

A website is a powerful advertising tool in today’s business world. Websites used to be only for the tech-savvy and major corporations but over a short period of time, have quickly been adopted by smaller businesses and do-it-yourself type people.

In the not so distant past, if you didn’t have a website, your business was nothing. Now, it’s almost assumed that if you have a business, you should also have a website. Keep in mind, not all websites are the same!

Many companies have capitalized on the need for having a website and it’s obvious there is a market that is over-saturated with website designers – all with different pricing and skills. In fact, you may or may not have seen advertising that reads, “Websites for as low as 9.00″ or major domain companies now jumping in on the “we do websites” craze with offers that seem too good to be true. Unfortunately, for most people spending their hard earned cash – it is.

The term “You get what you pay for” only holds so much weight these days. You know you want the best work for the best price but how can a business owner know what to look for in a web design company? How is the cost of building a website determined? How will you know you are making the right decision for your business?

The answer is simple – TAKE THE TIME TO RESEARCH AND PREPARE.

Remember, your website will reflect what people think of your business!
Have a budget – A website is a true investment in your business. When you hire a professional developer to build your site, you are paying for time and you are paying for ideas and expertise. The true cost of a website is usually broken down by how long vs. at what rate. Think of it as hiring a full time employee for a period of 2 to 6 weeks.
Know what you want in a website. This may sound easy but it’s surprising how many people DO NOT! If you don’t know what you want in a website, then you shouldn’t even be shopping for one. Try looking up your competition and see what they are doing. Write down lots of notes before making a phone call or dropping any inquiries.
Don’t shop the lowest bidder. Also, don’t shop the highest bidder either. Shopping based solely on price will bite you in the long run. Many small businesses that have never purchased a website end up spending more money trying to save money because the “cheaper” websites didn’t live up to their expectations. Some small businesses end up paying for 3 websites when they could have simply spent money on one. Cheaper is not always better. On the other hand, some smaller designers may see larger companies charging a pretty penny and think they can do the same, only to deliver a lesser product. This pitfall can be avoided as long as you follow the next few steps.
Spend time with your prospects. Don’t just talk to someone over the phone when trying to find a design firm. Go to their location or have them come to yours. Again, ask questions but more importantly, have them show you examples of what they have already done.
Spend time READING the design firm’s website. You just might learn more about the company and their clients than you think. You might also find hidden warning signs when browsing a design firm’s website. Website design company pages change often but if you start to notice a bunch of under construction pages, coming soon pages, or an uncommon amount of broken links or poorly written content, it could be a sign that this company is lazy and may take you for a ride. Think about it, if they don’t take the time to make their own business website look good, what will they do for YOUR business?
To outsource or not to outsource? To answer this is simple, if your clients are going to be local to your area – hire a local developer or firm who knows the surroundings and is familiar with the local cultures. If your clientele is of a foreign base, you might want to hire a developer of the targeted foreign market who understands that particular culture.
Get references. If a company can’t provide you at least 2 or 3 references, then it may not be a good idea to use them. Ask for a reference that has been doing business with the design firm for a year or more. This is important since it can easily eliminate most fly-by-night web designers.
Look for Analytics or Website Reports. If you need more than just a pretty website with actual traffic statistics, you should have your web design company show you their website reports or analytics. Web analytics will show you how many people visit a website per day as well as show you how well a website performs. Companies who provide search engine optimization (also referred to as SEO) services are professionals who can bring traffic to your site. Unfortunately, 80% of design firms who claim they do SEO – do not truly know how to. Analytics = Proof is in the pudding!
Look for innovation and ideas. Any good web design company will offer ideas to make your business shine online. Listen for these golden tidbits of information as they usually amount to having a site built better than you expected. Just keep in mind, the more innovation, the more cost. Just make sure this innovation is listed in the quote or proposal and how much it’s going to set you back. (Remember rule #1 – your cost is based off of ideas, expertise, and time.)
Have your content and images ready! Before you embark on a journey to build your business, sit down with your business partner, spouse, or friends and physically write down your business model or structure. Also, gather a collection of images you require and put them into organized folders doing so will help your designer understand what goes where. Otherwise, be prepared to fork out even more money to have your content written for you and stock images also cost money if you don’t have photos. Having your content written for your business takes time and research. If you go this route, make sure your copywriter can write your business content in a way that is search engine friendly. Just keep in mind, it’s a copyright infringement to cut and paste content from your competitors or take images from other websites just in case you think it will save you a buck!

More Web Analytics Articles

Website Design Plus Website Analytics Plus SEO Equals Online Success!

At some point you have considered website design and SEO. You may have even tried to design your own website with applying SEO and not reached the effect you hoped to obtain. Like many other online website design and marketing techniques, website design and SEO together can and does work, by applying yourself and comprehending which keywords your website is being found with, by keeping familiar of tendencies in the industry and responding to them. With some fundamental awareness that you have previously been missing, you can open the avenues to new and exciting openings for profits that you have been absent from.

Website Design Plus Website Analytics Plus SEO Equals Online Success! Let’s begin with the presumption that you want more visitors to your website, to effectively grow your business. With 86.7% of Internet users using search engines to find websites [Enquiro Search Study] it’s apparent that your website has to come up high in the search engines rankings, so you can get your piece if not most of those potential customers. There is more additional information than just

Getting your website a high ranking and implementing Analytics to your group of tools is what will help you get the most out of not only your website design and SEO tactics, but ALL your online marketing crusades.

Analytics, as distinct by Wikipedia is the measurable extent of the actions of visitors to a website. In a commercial view, it non-specifically refers to the measure of which components of the website work towards the business goals; for instance, which pages stimulate visitors your purchase of your website.

There is an immense number of uses for website analytics. Website owners can use it to estimate website function and navigation as well as measuring customer interest in different advertisements and marketing campaigns, or it could be used to construct replication of the “whole picture” of your website’s lucrative gains. We want to center our attention on website analytics for website design and SEO goals in this article.

Good keyword phrases are more competitive today than ever, it takes more work to drive traffic to your site, and once you do you have to quickly obtain the interest of your visitors. Those visitors are very valuable and are the result of significant SEO efforts.

Therefore, it is critical to understand how visitors got to your site (which engines are driving traffic and which keywords), and even more critical to discover what they do once they get there. You need web Analytics reporting to tell you when and where people are leaving your site, where they are spending their time and much more.

Conclusion:
Whether you currently have a website and are running an SEO campaign, and simply need to add Analytics, or whether you are looking to start SEO and a new web design, now is the time to take action. With award winning Canada website design, at no extra cost, we include front page search engine listings and global marketing for every website we create, guaranteed! Simply contact us or visit our home page for more details.
Creatively yours, Todd Herman
President
Senior Vice President
GlobalWebsiteCreations.com

Website Analytics ? Make Your eMarketing Matter

With the Reserve Bank reducing interest rates by another 50 basis points in South Africa this week, it seems that the country is officially out of its financial slump. While this may free up a bit of extra cash for consumers, and will hopefully boost spending and consumer confidence, lessons have undoubtedly been learnt during the lean times we experienced during 2009.

Consumers were far more cautious about their spending with most household tightening their belts and restricting themselves to the basic essentials. Businesses too learnt how to make do with less and many slashed marketing and advertising budgets and instead shifted their focus onto client retention and adding value to services.

Now that the worst is over it doesn’t mean that it’s time to return to wasteful spending. On the contrary, perhaps the best lesson for businesses from these tough economic times was that it’s so important to make every marketing cent count. Central to this is measuring exactly what’s working and what isn’t – this is the way to squeeze the most value out of marketing spend.

Online marketing is not only far more cost-effective than traditional channels, but it also enjoys far greater penetration, more accurate targeting and it is completely measurable. Analytics allows you to determine where exactly your visitors are coming from, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it on your site.

This goes hand in hand with website usability. It’s possible to fine tune your web analytics to focus on measuring which activities lead to sales or conversions. This allows you to concentrate on what’s important to your bottom line. Also, you’ll be able to gather information that will allow you to make intelligent choices about design and structural changes to improve the usability and effectiveness of your website as a marketing tool.

With web analytics, it’s possible to analyse what content is most engaging to customers. Google Analytics is a free enterprise-grade analytics solution which includes fantastic advanced features like user segmentation, custom reporting, benchmarking and e-commerce tracking. Google Analytics’ easy customisation means you can quickly create dashboards, reports and visualisations that matter to you.

Website conversion analytics is really what brings all your eMarketing efforts together. It’s where you’ll see your results and, with proper interpretation of the metrics and by looking at trends, you’ll be able to optimise your digital marketing strategies to ensure you get the most out of your online marketing spend.

More Web Analytics Articles

Making Your Website Work

Tracking Web statistics

Design a website that gets visitors to take action. See if visitors are actually reaching the desired goal. Today, website ROI is measured by conversions – how frequently visitors reach your goals. No marketing campaign is complete without measuring the effects of online marketing.

A number of small businesses spend a considerable time and effort in building websites and a lot of spend goes in marketing the site but almost no time or effort is spent in measuring the marketing campaign performance. Monitoring and studying your website traffic lets you know what campaigns are working and helps you understand where the efforts need to be eased and where they need to be concentrated.

A good web-monitoring tool will give a fair idea of the existing gaps between the marketing campaign and results. You will get a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from and might be surprised to see some filtering from unlikely sources.

If you have launched a new service – a newsletter, signup or are offering a free product – track sources and the path traveled to see if these are working or not. If users are leaving the goal path mid way then make changes to tune the path for better conversions.

Some of the areas that you can track on most web analytics are:

Tracking pages

Check the pages that are most frequented by users and those that are not. If visitors are not surfing to the page you want them to see, make better links. Look at the entry and exit pages. See the pages that get hit the most? Which ones draw the least web traffic? Which pages are bookmarked, as bookmarked pages tend to draw traffic directly?

Entry pages are those from where the visitor entered your site. This can be from a search engine, an affiliate, or a link from a post or forum or a referring site. If a visitor came in from a search query and left immediately, it is obvious they didn’t find what they were looking for. If this happens examine the keywords that bring in the search. Do they tally with your offering?

If your visitors consistently exit just before clicking on the ‘Buy’ button, you may have a pricing problem. Visit your competition and have a look. Try to add fresh offers and discounts. Once again reassess your key words.

Track the time spent on a page and the site. More time spent means information offered is relevant and of interest.

Top landing pages

This report will show you how many visitors reach your landing page and the path taken from there. It is a good measure of assessing how many visitors is the site loosing from each landing page. Visitors leaving the site after viewing just a single page increase the “bounce rate” for the entrance page. Your attempt should be to reduce the number of “bounces” on a page where the visitors are landing. Too many bounces” may mean that the page needs tweaking. If a large number of visitors are leaving the site instantly (higher bounce rate) it would mean a lower conversion rate. If you have made changes, study the trend over a period of time to know if the changes you are making are for the better.

Traffic Sources

Check the web stats for traffic coming form Search Engines, the number of Searches, total Searches, Keywords and phrases. Examining the total Searches gives you an idea on how well your marketing efforts are paying off. Higher searches translate to higher hits – check to see that there is no downward shift on the total searches. If this happens re-look your keywords.

Check other sources that are sending traffic to your site – referrals. Referrals are links form other websites to your site. These could include affiliates, ads etc.

Visitor Tracking

This would be the most important area of stats monitoring. Identifying unique visitors, distinguishing unique and returning visitors helps you determine how effective you are in getting new visitors, and how well you retain them. If the site shows an increase in the number of pages viewed per visitor it could mean that potential customers to the site are finding more relevant content – hence tend to “stick” longer on the site. If page views start to increase then you are on track and this should result in an increase in sales. A fall in the duration of time spent on your site is early indicator of falling interest.

Site Overlay

Site overlay indicates the areas on the entrance page that are being clicked on. You can follow the click path to see where the visitors are clicking to reach the goal. Check for the conversion percentage: how frequently visitors who click there convert to each of your goals.

Define Goals

All goals are not sales. A goal is would be a desired action performed by the visitor when browsing through the site. These would be those desired actions taken by visitors – that add to the success of your business. A signup, filling a contact form or any other connecting point that takes the visitor to the final action can also be defined as a goal. Different goals can be assigned to study different metrics.

Funnels

Funnels defined within goals help identify the areas where visitors are abandoning the path. This let’s you track where you are losing visitors on the path to conversion. You can chalk out the path that you expect the visitors to take and track where on the path are you losing the visitors. Further for exits you can also trace the path of funnel exits as well as funnel entries. This helps you identify the key areas that need tweaking – too much abandonment from the path may mean re-looking at the path defined for users – this may be due to too many clicks to reach the end, unclear instructions, too many options etc.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of measuring your performance against the better performing sites within your industry. Benchmarking within your industry is essential to the success of your business. Boosts and dips in traffic within specified days, time etc in comparison to other sites in the industry would give you a meaningful insight into your website stats. However benchmarking only works if you are willing to share data.

Google analytics allows you to be able to compare your site’s Visits, Page views, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

There are a number of options for website statistics measurement. Some of the free popular webs tracking tools are:

Google Analytics

www.google.com/analytics: Google analytics allows you to track traffic sources, visitor stats, Keyword and Campaign Comparison, Custom Dashboards, integrate adwords, tv and audio campaigns, Benchmarking, Funnel Visualization, site overlay etc.

StatCounter

www.statcounter.com: Offers both paid and unpaid services. Some of the features offered include ccnfigurable Summary Stats, Magnify User, Drill Down, Popular Pages, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Came From, Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity, Search Engine Wars, Visitor Paths, Visit Length, Returning Visits, Recent Pageload Activity, Recent Visitor Activity, Country/State/City Stats, Recent Visitor Google Map, ISP Stats, Browser Stats, O.S. Stats, Resolution Stats, JavaScript Stats etc.

Gostats

www.gostats.com:Gostats gives detailed information on page statistics, visitor statistics, link statistics, System stats.

Onestatfree

www.onestatfree.com: with the OneStat Free tracker you can easily check the number of visitors and page views, visitor profile, popular pages on the site, traffic sources, browser stats, daily stats, site comparison etc.

In his short video Jim Sterne talks about the Web Analytics Association (WAA, www.webanalyticsassociation.org/), of which he helped found in 2005. Goals are education, support, community, standards, and advocacy in this industry association made up of consultants, vendors, and practitioners. They sponsor training through online classes in Web Analytics through the University of British Columbia (www.tech.ubc.ca/metrics/).

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