Chances are that the hosting service for your blog or website offers some free Website Analytics tools along with your domain package.
The tools are there, but do you use them to your advantage? If not, you are missing out on some valuable information to help your internet marketing efforts.
All The Data On Your Report Can Be Useful!
• Look at what pages are getting viewed most often. If you have a blog, what posts are the ones being most referred and which are most popular overall? This will give you a good idea of what topics you can cover in more depth. The reverse is also true. Those pages or posts that do not get a lot of traffic may need some changing.
• Another aspect of this statistic is page views, or the number of times visitors to your site have gone to any of the pages. Some analytic tools will show you “page views per visit”, which gives an average of the total pages viewed by each person at your website. If this number is high, chances are your content is interesting enough to make a visitor want to further explore the entire site after landing there.
• A look at the top entry pages along with referring sites and keywords will give you an insight as to what topics are of interest to the most number of visitors. Again, this tells you the content you should be writing about in future blog posts or in articles for your site. Referring sites will also show the effects of your internet marketing efforts. Keywords let you know what words or phrases you should include in your content and you can see which sites and topics are bringing you the most traffic so you can capitalise on that.
• For an e-commerce site, looking at the statistics about visitors can give you some important information. If you are getting a lot of traffic from foreign countries, you may to ensure that your site is friendly towards them. Perhaps you could install a translation tool; certainly you will want to make sure that as an affiliate marketing partner, merchant sites accept various forms of currency.
Website Analytics tools help you analyse where your traffic is coming from, how effective your page structure is, and you can look at these numbers to help you organise future marketing campaigns. You should be analysing this data on a very regular basis.
Where To Find Analytics Tools
If you are dissatisfied with the number of analytic tools offered by your hosting service, there are plenty of free downloads available on the internet. AWStats, StatCounter, and Webalizer are all good, free software tools you can add to any website or blog. Take a look at each to determine which one will be easiest for you to use, and understand.
Then there is Google Analytics. This analytic tool is perhaps the most advanced out of those offered for free. There is a bit more setup involved if you are going to use this program, but it also offers a good deal more functionality.
No matter if you pay for software or use a free program to track statistics on your website, you will have to take the time to analyse what you see in order for it to be worthwhile. There is a wealth of information included in Website Analytics tools if you know how to properly use them.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Sean
I use Google Analytics and find it brilliant. The information from my hosting account didn’t seem to be accurate enough. I’m not sure. When I received a surge of traffic recently my WP blog stats recorded it but it wasn’t shown on my hosting stats. Do you know any reason why this would be?
I never look at the hosting stats to be honest. Stick with Google analytics or WP stats.
Hi Sean,
I love Google Analytics. It gives me a lot of information to help me improve my site. It really helps knowing where most of my traffic comes from because it wasn’t where I thought it was.
Google Analytics and WP Stats are the Free Website Analytics Tools that I use the most. I like to also do a little analysis with Market Samurai, as well. Somehow, MS has a way of presenting data that makes me feel better. Very clever.
Hi Wal,
Market Samurai always gives me comfort too. When you know that the numbers add up; you know that you’re going to get the result you want. It’s a whole lot better than flying blind.
Hey Sean,
I’m looking forward to putting all this new knowledge into action. Google Analytics sounds like it will be a lot of fun, once it starts getting information to analyse. I love toying around with my budget, seeing if I can squeeze just a little more out of it (as well as actually following it! *LOL*) I enjoy juggling figures around.
Just a thought!
Cheers,
Pete
I was using Google analytics as it tied in with the google adwords I was running…and it provided more information than I could fathom. Will have to reread this post as it has more useful content than I could take in all at once…Thanks Sean \m/
Sean, I haven’t been using google analytics to it’s full potential. Your post has given me a kick start to go back in and use it as well as check out the free software tools you mentioned I can add to my blog.
Thanks
Tanny
The only free website analytics tool I use is Google Analytics. It is amazing the amount of information you can glean from the data provided by this amazing tool. I strongly recommend that anyone with a website or blog take the time to signup and learn to use Google Analytics. Even if your blog is only a vanity blog, keeping track of it with Google Analytics will provide you with extremely interesting information about your visitors.