Effective marketing is all about knowing your customers and their buying habits.

A good grasp on who your target market is and how they search the internet for information goes a long way toward helping you decide on an approach that results in the highest number of conversions.

One way to accomplish this is to take a look at what is currently working. When you make a sale, do you know how your customer found you and where they navigated before ultimately making a purchase?

This knowledge can come from an in-depth look at your site’s statistics. The AW Stats Program, is both free and comprehensive.

AW Stats Program Features

For being a free software program, AW Stats is filled with lots of features. It is has been popular for many years because of this as well as the fact that it works seamlessly on a variety of different server platforms including Perl and CGI.

The AW Stats Program provides the following information via a full log analysis on your website:

• Unique visitors as well as overall number of visits.
• Duration of visits, date and time of last visit.
• Authenticated users and their last visit.
• Number of page visits and hits by hour and day of week.
• The country and domain of each visitor.
• Listing of hosts and unresolved IP addresses.
• Most viewed pages and entry/exit pages.
• Browsers used.
• Operating Systems used.
• Bot visits from the 115 most common search engines.
• The keywords, phrases, and search engines used to access your site.
• HTTP errors, such as “404: File Not Found”.
• How many times your site was added to a favourites list.
• Number of browsers that support Flash, Java, and other types of content.
• Screen size of visitors’ computers.

How To Use The Information For Marketing

Obviously, there is a lot of information from AW Stats to browse through. What can you focus on to help your online marketing efforts?

Look at the countries where your visitors are coming from. If you are selling products or services with a global customer base as your goal, make sure that international visitors can easily order using their own currency with appropriate shipping options available.

Your most viewed pages and those which visitors enter on and exit from are good indicators of what content on your site is most popular. Use the information to expound upon and drive traffic to other pages.

Determine how many times a visitor came upon your site but was unable to see the content clearly because their browser did not support flash animation or the screen size was too small. The rule of thumb is to make your website friendly to all visitors, regardless of their computer’s capabilities. This will result in the highest number of conversions.

What keywords are being used to bring them in? Does the page they land on answer the query they made? You can use keyword information to help you modify your content and expand on keywords you’re already ranking for as well as to decide which new words and phrases to target next.

How many times are visitors to your site encountering an error? These statistics will clearly show which pages are not working properly, giving you the chance to fix them before it causes further frustration to those accessing your site.

As with any tool, using the information gleaned from the AW Stats Program is only effective if you take the time and effort to review it and make appropriate adjustments. Statistics can be a powerful addition to your internet marketing toolbox.