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Many home-based online
entrepreneurs keep their eyes on the ball, but fail to stop to check the
score. In the rush to be online, these entrepreneurs focus too much on where
they are going - e.g. increasing their traffic and sales, marketing their
sites, improving their content, attracting a community of loyal visitors,
and other goals. While important for the success of an online business, they
often overlook checking where their businesses are. Many Web publishers fail
to understand how users come to the site and what those users do once they
get there. Not knowing where exactly a business stands is risky,
particularly on the Internet where things change so rapidly.
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A web site owner must put the task of understanding a site's metrics and
statistics as a priority goal every day. It must be on top of the daily
to-do list, prior to other activities such as marketing and promotion.
Everything else hinges on statistics, because it provides the essential
measurements of performance and market competitiveness.While there is not one statistical figure that can neatly summarize
audience activity and the associated revenue-generating potential of a
Website, assessing the daily statistics could provide the owner with a
clearer direction and focus. A site's metrics provide a wealth of
information to help businesses attract and serve customers, enhance
marketing effectiveness, and engage advertisers. Particularly, statistics
could present the online entrepreneur with a handle to:
1. Monitor
overall site growth. Traffic
and sales (whether advertising sales or product sales) measure the overall
growth of site. Assessing a site's traffic entails counting eyeballs. Hits
and page views are the traditional metrics to determine a site's growth and
reach. Early on, however, the online industry has discarded using the notion
of hits to measure a site's effectivity. Hits counted 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.
Page view, which is a metric that tracks how many individual HTML pages
were served up to Web surfers, provides a more accurate measure of a site's
popularity. Advertisers look for a site's page views to determine the
potential reach of a site.
Online entrepreneurs, however, must clarify where the increase in page
views is coming from. A rising page view is a direct result of three things:
(a) an increase in traffic; (b) an increase in the number of the site's
pages; or (c) a combination of both. Web publishers must strive for an
increasing page views resulting from an increase in traffic. Alas, any
correlation between the company's revenue growth and its traffic boosts
could be considered almost coincidental.
2. Easily
monitor marketing campaign performances. If
a visitor clicks on a link or a banner to get to a site, the visitor's
browser will send the URL of the site he or she just left, along with the
request. This URL is called the "referrer." Referrer statistics
provide the information to determine the effectiveness of a site's marketing
campaigns. Most web statistics software provide data on where visitors come
from - whether from referring domains, URLs, newsgroups, emails, major
domains, referrer countries, search engines and keywords used, and path from
referrer. Taking time to look at where visitors are coming from could yield
answers to marketing considerations:
- How effective are the banner campaigns? Are visitors coming from
banners placed in other sites? Is the banner exchange program working?
- Is the site getting enough traffic from emails? If traffic is coming
from emails, what percentage are due to: (a) newsletters regularly sent
out to subscribers; (b) visitor sent email to a friend recommending the
site; or (c) email campaigns? Is the traffic commensurate to the amount
paid for the email lists?
- How many people are coming to the site via the search engines? Are the
pay-per-click search engines bringing enough traffic? How cost-effective
are paid search engine submission services, which submits to thousands
of search engines and directories? If traffic comes only from ten search
engines and directories, perhaps the site owner could reconsider paying
to submit to search engines and manually submit its site to directories
and search engines that actually bring in traffic.
- If part of the marketing plan is to submit articles to other sites,
how effective is article syndication in bringing in traffic? Which among
the sites that uses the articles actually bring in visitors?
- Is the web site getting the needed exposure from its partnership
arrangements?
- Are the numerous postings in newsgroups and discussion boards
resulting in increased traffic?
- How does referrals change over time? Tracking the changes can provide
information on how to mix and match various marketing options.
Referrer statistics show which among the marketing campaigns are bringing
the best results. The data helps Web publishers determine where to put their
advertising dollars, what sites to partner or collaborate with, and identify
the banners or links that are bringing the desired traffic.
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3. Track
customer interest in products and services. A
web site owner can gauge the interests of its visitors in a number of ways.
The first is through the popularity of a site's pages. Statistics to measure
this include the most requested pages, time spent on pages, time spent on
site, depth of visit and content grouping statistics.
Knowing the pages that people visit will help a web site owner understand
the kind of information that his or her visitors want. Take a gaming site,
for example, that offers role-playing games, card games, online games and
video games. If the owner finds that online games is the most popular
section, he or she can decide to beef up this section and expand its
offering. The owner can also start to rethink the least popular pages, and
develop strategies to improve its popularity.
The search function installed in a site can be an effective tool of
knowing what the users want. What information is the user looking that is
not in the site? Referrer statistics also provide some insight on visitors'
interests by showing what other sites these users visit.
4. Drive
e-commerce sales. A
sizeable traffic does not guarantee skyrocketing sales. Rather, the quality
of traffic influences a site's sales numbers. A site's metrics can help
pinpoint where the desired visitors are coming from. Are most of the product
buyers coming from email campaigns, or are they coming from targeted links?
Are the visitors that search engines bring buying, or are they merely
browsing your pages?
5. Improve site
design and navigation. Statistics
that show the percentage of page views from various versions of browsers and
operating systems can provide a glimpse of how a site is experienced by a
user. How many visitors use Macs or PCs? Is the site enabled for both users
of Netscape and Internet Explorer, and its various versions? A site enabled
for use by different versions of browsers and operating systems can reach a
wider audience.
The length of a user's visit and the number of pages used by a single
visitor is also an indication of the effectiveness of a site's design. A
huge number of users who leave after logging on to the homepage should
prompt questions on the quality of the site. Why are the users leaving? Why
are they not enticed enough to enter the site and explore the contents?
The kinds of queries on the site's search engine can provide a clue on
the quality of the site's navigation structure. An often-repeated search for
information that exists on the site is an indication that users are finding
it hard to find that particular section.
6. Improve
customer service and technical support. Part
of a web site owner's responsibility is to understand the capacity of their
site (even if a third party host is used). Technical problems can be
minimized, if not eliminated, if information on when users are accessing the
site is known. This entails understanding page views by time - and whether
people visit your site before work hours, during work, or after work. The
technical support and customer service system can then be designed
accordingly to respond to various timeframes of peak users. If a substantial
percentage of a site's users are from other countries and come to visit
while the owner is sleeping, auto responders can then be set up to reply
quickly to some of the most common queries of visitors.
In order to attain the goal of enhancing visitor and customer experience,
a web site owner must be able to assemble a picture of their site's traffic.
It will not be perfect - far from it - but it will provide with enough
information to get an idea of how the site is doing and how it can be
improved.
About the Author:
Nach M Maravilla is the publisher
of Power Homebiz Guides.
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