It pays to analyse the traffic to your virtual storefront or front office on a regular basis. If you use either of the hosting services recommended here (Third Sphere or Site Build It!) you will find that the required tracking tools are built into the system. If you use another service that doesn’t provide this facility, then try this; type ‘website statistics + free software’ in to the Google search box and it will fetch up several options.
Why Is It Important To Monitor Your Visitors?
You get traffic to your website but what do they do when they reach your site?
- Do they visit the pages you want them to visit?
- Do they leave shortly after arriving?
- What pages are they interested in?
Armed with this important information you can tweak the content to help maximise virtual footfall interest. What good is it to have hundreds of visitors to your site if all they do is leave right away or look at pages that are not all that important to you?
The Statistics Report Contains All You Need For Analysis
TrafficPage views: Page views are the number of times HTML pages are loaded in your visitor’s browser. This indicates whether your website is interesting enough to look further into it and explore more pages.
Repeat visits: Determines who browsed your site more than once during the selected time period.
- Do you give your visitors a reason to return to your site?
- Is your site updated frequently with articles and content?
Activity
By time zone: Shows you what hour of the day they visited your site according to their time zone.
By local time: Shows you what hour of the day they visited your site according to your time zone.
Day of the week: Shows you the day of the week they visited; weekday or weekend. You can determine the best days to update your site or send out important information to your customers
Work/leisure time: What type of people visit your site can be determined from this information.
- Do people view your website during typical business hours or do they visit after they have gone home?
- Should you be concentrating on business people or what?
Navigation
Navigation paths: A navigation path is a sequence of pages that the
visitor viewed from the moment they entered the site to the moment of departure. From the marketing viewpoint it is important to know the most common paths your visitors follow to get to the landing pages (that is the pages where the target events take place, such as ordering, file downloading, form filling and submission, etc.). You will learn which of the navigation paths are the most effective. The frequent exit patterns will show where your site is underperforming and you will see where to improve the content of your site to make your visitors’ experience perfect.
Entry pages: The entry page that a visitor goes to when first visiting your website. By setting your links to go to specific pages of your website you can determine which referral links are working and which are not.
Exit pages: The exit page is where a visitor departs your site.
- Do your exit pages match your entry pages? If so, then see what you can do to fix your entry page to keep visitors on your site.
- Is it a navigation problem?
- Content not good enough?
Pages viewed after the home page: The success of your website depends on how short the journey from your home page to where your target page is. This also helps uncover navigation problems or lack of interest in your site.
Site stickiness: These are visits grouped by the time that visitors stay; it is a sign of how well a site’s content captures the visitor’s attention.
- Do they leave a few seconds after entering?
- Or are they thoroughly interested in what you have to say on your website?