Realize Your Business

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

The last entry discussed the use of autoresponders. These are great tools for collecting names and email addresses, and for automating the sending of email to those prospects.

With the autoresponder, you can see how many people have signed up for your list. But how do you know if that is a good or bad number? How many people visited your site compared to the number of people who registered at your site? How well does your sales page convert visitors into buyers?

What you need is a tool to collect statistics for your site so you can answer those kinds of questions.

Step 1 is to decide which pages of your website need statistics. I am using my blog home page for this purpose, but you might want to use a squeeze page or a sales letter. Where are you driving traffic? That is the page where you want to add a statistics counter.

Step 2 is to find a tool to measure web statistics. There are quite a number of tools on the market, some free, some for a monthly charge. I am currently using the free version of gostats – http://www.gostats.com – largely because there is a WordPress plugin for it and I use WordPress for my blogs. It is easier to use tools that are designed to work together.

You can do a search on “web stats” in a search engine to get quite a list of possibilities. Just look through the first few to see which ones give you the statistics you want for your website.

Once you have selected a company, Step 3 is to create an account with that company, and register your webpage in that account. The web stats company will give you HTML code for that page. For example, one web page I registered is http://www.writingusecases.com/wordpress/index.html

If you browse to that page (open in another window so you can read this article while you browse the statistics), you will see the gostats counter at the bottom. Click on that counter, and you will see the statistics for that page. You can look over those statistics as you read the rest of this article.

Notice I am not registering the domain, but a particular page that I want to track.

Step 4 is to add that HTML code to the web page that you registered. Since I am using a gostats plugin for Wordpress, I just have to put the site id and gostats server name into the gostats options page in the administrator panel for Wordpress. The site id and gostats server are provided by gostats when I register the web page in my account.

Once you have completed all the setup, the statistics software does all the collecting of information. Periodically (daily, weekly) log into your account and look at the statistics for your site. I can see the number of page views, the number of visitors, how many visitors today, yesterday, the last 7 days, the last 30 days, and the total since the page was registered. I can see graphs with this information and notice trends such as every weekend the number of visitors drops dramatically, then the number increases again on Monday.

In my case, that pattern tells me that posting a blog entry on Sunday means it will be there ready for increased traffic on Monday. But if I post on Friday, very few people will see the post over the weekend.

I can also see where my visitors came from – what country, what IP, what page they were on before coming to my site. This last is great because you can see what query a person entered into a search engine to find your page. This will help you determine if your keywords are optimized for your site. Or you might find that people are using keywords you had not considered.

Another interesting statistic is Rank. This is the gostats rank for my web page based on number of visitors. I like to see that my rank is improving over time. On the right of the statistics is a link for pages popularity. Now I can see which pages on my site (linked to from the main page) are getting the most visits. Since I am using the stats counter on a blog, I can quickly see which topics are the most interesting to readers of this blog, and which are the least interesting.

Another interesting number is the average time a visitor spends on my site. Now this is a little misleading, because the tool counts all visitors – which includes search engine spiders or crawlers. Since they spend far less than one minute on my site, and there are so many of them, the numbers are not the best. But I can use the numbers in the statistics reports, remove those under one minute (assuming they are not real people), and recalculate the average. That is how long I have to get someone’s attention on my web page.

This article gives you an idea of the kinds of information available to you from web stats tools. There are many more statistics available, and if you choose to go with a paid subscription, you can get even more. Since you can get a good tool for free, and it is easy to set up, there is no excuse for not having statistics about your web pages, and a volume of information that you can use to build your business.

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Now it is your turn.

Are you tracking visitors to your site? What tool are you using?

Can you see how useful this information can be to you in learning more about your market?
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You are invited to re-publish articles from this blog, in your publication or website, as long as the article is intact and you include the following Byline paragraph (with live links) after each article you use…

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* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Realize Your Business website at http://www.realizeyourbusiness.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as the Owner/Manager of a small business.

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