How to Manage your Site Statistics

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Understanding and tracking your website activity is a ‘must’ to becoming a successful internet marketer. You should be consistently using your customer metrics to understand who your customers are, what motivates them to come and visit your site. You can use these learnings to make improvements to your site to drive new visits, return visits, and ultimately sales.

But where do you start? Let’s take a look at some ways in which you can quickly and easily analyze your site traffic.

To maximize your stats, explore:

Which pages have the most impact

Check out how your different website pages vary in popularity (by Visitors and Page Views – Note: One visitor to your site can produce many page views), and how long customers are spending on each page (Visit Length). Make sure to keep your most popular pages active and fresh, by making frequent updates for return visitors and enhancements for new visitors. Can you define what elements make your top pages so popular and try applying them to your less trafficked pages? This is a good way to ensure that all of the pages on your site are getting traffic, not just a few.

Where your visitors are located

See what areas or cities your visitors are from to understand who you’re targeting (Location). If most of your customers are local, consider optimizing your search engine performance for local listings with an Online Search Profile (include link to search tool/page). Perhaps you’d like to print advertise to your customers, or see if a recent print advertising campaign has driven traffic to your site. By knowing the locations of your visitors, you can better tailor your local marketing campaigns.

What days of the week and times of the day your visitors visit

This is very important, because once you know this, you can ensure that you’re updating content or enhancements on the site to coincide with “busy times” just like you would merchandise a story when the rush is coming in.

Orient your promotions, major site changes, and specials on the days that your visitors tend to visit your site. Look for patterns to see if most visits are on weekends or particular days. Further, with Advanced Site Activity, hourly reporting shows what times of day your customers are most receptive. Schedule an email marketing campaign to get their attention and drive extra traffic to your site for these times. Then make sure you measure the impact to see if the timing actually had an impact on traffic.

What causes spikes

When you create additions to your site, closely monitor how they’re received through your Site Activity. For example, if you’ve made page-specific changes, do visitors stay on the page longer (Visit Length)? If you’ve added a controversial blog post, by how much did your blog traffic increase that day or week (Blog Stats)? Has the new extra feature (like an image, video, or map) you added been used by customers (Feature Usage)?

Enjoy getting to know your visitors and how they react to your site, and to tune your website marketing accordingly. As you make changes to your site check in to see how they perform and as your readership changes see how your stats do too!