How To Use Web Analytics

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 2:59
Posted in category Affiliate Marketing
by Justin Harrison

As a website owner, you would want to analyze the progress of your website in terms of who is visiting it and how many times. This information would help you improve your website. However, to fetch this information, you would need a web analytics tool. Although, you could find all such information the log file; it can be a tedious task to read through a log file that has so many records in it. A web analytics tool serves as an ideal utility to explain you the traffic flow of your website with simple and sorted data. Web analytics is a useful exercise and you must know how to use it. Following is the description of the same.

To start with, you must collect the data. If you have a web analytics tool installed, it may already be doing the stuff for you. You need to include all aspects of your website that collect data. Such aspects include CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and other kinds of data that your website generates.

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:

Does your traffic flow increase at a specific time? Which pages get visited more often? How many pages does an average visitor visit? How long does your visitor stay at the site? How much traffic are you able to draw from search engines. Which pages act as exit points for your visitors? What are your inbound links?

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 visitors must know what changes you have made to your website. For this, you will need to promote your website in a way that your updates are highlighted. Unless people know about the improvements, it serves no good.

You must repeat the above process time and again. This is in fact, a continual process that you must do.

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2 Responses to “How To Use Web Analytics”

  1. Jenna says:

    June 23rd, 2009 at 7:39 pm

    Pretty good post. I just came across your blog and wanted to say
    that I’ve really liked reading your posts. Any way
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  2. Richie G says:

    July 19th, 2009 at 6:27 pm

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