Why Analyze Website Visitors
To succeed you need to Analyze what happens when visitors come to your website
- How did they find your website
- Which pages they most frequently view
- Which pages they visit
- How often they buy and more
Tools:
You can do this with a variety of tools including:
- The website statistics provided by your web host.
- Services like Google Analytics that give you detailed data about your visitors behavior.
- Services like Crazy Egg that create a heat map that shows where your visitor are spending more time and clicking. You can use a WordPress plugin Hotspots (FREE)
- Try click tracking services like Your Ad Tracker or your own shopping cart may include some click tracking.
Statistics like this help you understand a whole lot about how your website is performing for example:
- How many visitors you have in a given month, particular day, etc.
- Which days and times are most popular.
- Where your visitors are coming from.
- How long they are staying on your site.
- How many pages they view before leaving.
- Whether or not they’re coming back.
- How many new and repeat visitors you’re receiving.
- Which keyphrases they are entering into search engines to find your site.
- Which pages are most popular.
- Which products they spend the most time on.
- Which pages they enter from most frequently.
- Which pages they exit from your site most frequently.
- Geographic location of your visitors.
- Which operating systems and web browsers they are using to access your website.
- Which links they are clicking.
This information allows you to make many adjustments including:
- Knowing which pages are most popular allows you to maximize your selling opportunities on these pages.
- Knowing where your visitors are leaving your website allows you to plug any possible links (of course, if they’re leaving to click an Adsense ad or visit an affiliate site, that’s a good thing).
- Knowing where on a page the majority of your visitors are drawn to, you can readjust and maximize your results.
- Knowing how long visitors view a page can help you analyze the effectiveness of the page itself.
- Which links are being clicked on can tell you what offers your visitors are interested in and gives you a chance to test different approaches to making offers.
…and the opportunities are endless from what you discover when you start to analyse website visitors.
Website Speed
Slow websites are the most frequent complaints from web users. If you suspect you are losing visitors due to your website performance you should visit THIS ONE it is an excellent resource for optimization. Until you learn all what the suggestions mean just read the top result. It compares your website with others as regards speed.
Another important factor in your website analysis is not to confuse hits with visits
Hits are requests made for files, for example you could have 10 different files in your home page: graphics, Java Scripts, videos etc; visitors to your home page will register automatically as ten hits. So you could have ten hits with just one visitor to your homepage.
Hits are a very unreliable way to measure your traffic and traffic progress. You should be concerned about the number of visitors to your site.
I like the heat map app idea.
I’ve just downloaded the plugin as I just found about it researching. Let you know what happens lol
Great post with lots of great information. Thanks bunches!
Thanks for sharing this. I’ve just started looking into my web traffic since I started the UBC. This is very helpful to me!
Hi, thanks, there is so much to do and learn though 🙂 I added this resource for Website speed. I forgot to do in my original post http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Having enough time to do what we want is incredibly valuable. Your valuable post saves us time by helping us to target the most pro-active people rather than wasting time on tyre kickers. man.y thanks
A lot of entrepreneurs are afraid of website analytics – I think it maybe the bombardment of numbers thing, I’m not sure, but it is true that if you don’t know what’s going on on your site you won’t know if there is a problem. Google Analytics is a great free tool and businesses really need to learn how to set up goals in Google analytics so you can track what is happening at each stage of the product funnel. It makes it really easy to see if there’s a problem at a certain stage, makes it easy to track your conversion rate – and by testing even small changes you can make significant improvements to that conversion rate – and that means more money! Great post, Liliana!
Thank you, I agree about the numbers. I am a naturally number’s person so for me it is easy, although not always have time to implement everything. It its a question of planning and priorities. Thank you for the compliment, it means a lot from an expert.