Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Using The Web Analytics

By Justin Harrison

A website owner would know the significance of web analytics. You need to keep a track of number of people visiting your website, to do well with your website. To be able to do it, you would need a web analytics tool. One option would be to read through the log file. It is however a huge hard work to review the log book manually, for there may be so many records in it. For this reason, a web analytics tool is the right choice for you. With this tool, you would get clear and simple reports about your website traffic flow. You must know how to proceed with your web analytics and below is your guide to accomplish the same.

Firstly, you need to collect the data. In case you have a web analytics tool, it may well be collecting all the logs for you. You must remember to include all the parts of your website that may be collecting the data. Such parts may include CGI logs, Web logs, forms (email requests), and any other data that your website may be generating.

Once you have successfully collected the data, it needs to be transformed. It can be a tedious task to review the web logs manually. You would therefore need to transform the available data into an easily understandable format that can be manipulated. Most of the web analytics tools do this functionality as well. However, certain non-web log formatted data such as CGI may need you do the conversion.

Now that you have all the data available to you, in an easy to understand format; you need to start your analysis. This should be the most interesting part of your web analytics task. What you should be looking for is the trend in your web traffic. Following are some of the points to figure out the trend:

Do more visitors visit your site at a specific time? Which of your pages are the most commonly visited ones? How many pages does a visitor visit on an average? For how long does a visitor stay in the site? How much traffic do you get from the search engines? What are the exit pages of your website? Who has linked to your website?

After having done the data collection, and transformation of the same into reports, it is time to set new goals. Now that you know what your good and points are; you can build up on the good points and improve on the weak points. You may wish to add business links to your most visited pages, and promote the lesser visited pages. The idea should be to bank on your strengths to achieve more, and lift up your weakness to convert them into strengths.

Your potential visitors need to know what updates you have made to your website. Unless they are aware of the updates, your hard work would go in vain. This certainly calls for the promotion of your website, highlighting the newly made updates, to attract the visitors.

The above process is not a one time task, but you need to perform it continuously. The task is therefore a continuous process, and needs you to spend time on it regularly.

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