WEB SITE ANALYTICS:
Listening to What Your Site Has to Say a Web Site

By Staff Writer Why Analyze Your Web Site Statistics?

Simply put, detailed analysis of your site's traffic will help you learn about your audience and give you tools to increase the number of targeted visitors to your site.

What do all those Web site statistics really mean? Why should you spend time and resources analyzing who's visiting your site and what they are doing while there?

Simply put, detailed analysis of your site’s traffic will help you learn about your audience and give you tools to increase the number of targeted visitors to your site, which can ultimately help you increase your customer base.

Analyzing your Web site statistics and understanding what they are telling you about your customers, their interests, and how they interact with your site can have a tremendously, positive impact on the success of your business.

Business Development

It's always important to know who is coming to your site. When you realize what the profile of your customer base is, you can understand why your products are selling and plan what new services to introduce. You can also gain potential leads on where to find new customers. Keeping track of Web statistics can help you determine your average customer’s demographics—their age, what part of the world they live in, their income, etc.

Marketing and Advertising Sales

Analyzing your Web site traffic can help you prepare and offer promotions tailored to attract potential customers.

Analyzing your Web site traffic can help you prepare and offer promotions tailored to attract potential customers. You can experiment with different promotions and weigh the responses to determine what works best. In addition, if your site sells advertising, monitoring your Web traffic will give you solid statistics you can use to entice your advertising customers to buy in certain highly trafficked spots of your site.

Technical Resources and Capacity Planning

Tracking your Web site’s activity impacts your internal business structure as well. When you know more people are visiting your site, you may find you need to allocate more resources and equipment to expand how much you offer your customers. Identifying these trends early will enable you to prepare for your growing needs and not leave your customers wanting more than you are able to provide.

Understanding the Different Types of Statistics

There are two general types of Web analytic statistics available to you:

• Basic statistics usually require no special tools for analysis, and the information is available in the standard log files generated by Web servers. The information generally includes the IP addresses of visitors, the specific files accessed, the referrer, the date and time of access, and the type of browser used to find your site.



• Advanced statistics combine basic metrics to offer more significant and useful information, including unique visitors, referrer URLs and top entry pages, among other things. Most commercial site statistics packages provide this information in a format that is easy to interpret and understand.