Tools Of The Trade | Starting An Online Business

Archive for the ‘Tools of the Trade’ Category

How to Use Your Web Stats – Lesson 3

September 16th, 2009

As I discussed in the last few posts I am going to show you what is important in your Web Stats and how to analyze them to make improvements to your marketing efforts.

Remember to log into your WebStats…

a) Log into your hosting account’s C-Panel
b) Click on your Web/FTP Stats.
c) Choose any of the Stat options, however I use Awstats.

Scroll down past the Robot/Spider Visitor stats and soon you will see…

Visits Duration

This statistic tells you how long your visitors are staying on your website and what percentage that is of the total number of visitors.

You want to see the Number of Visits sitting in the 2-5 or 5-15 minute ranges. This will indicate that your visitors are at more than likely reading your sales letter or scanning the page for your offer.

If they are staying on longer than 30 minutes it is probably because they have left your website open in their browser to perhaps come back to when they have time to read it or they are comparing your product to another.

If the length of time for each visit is too low then your traffic was probably not very targeted and when they got to your page it was not what they expected or were looking for.

You will want to keep your eyes peeled for my next post in a few days. Lesson #4 will explain why the Visits Duration numbers may be low.

How to Use Your Web Stats – Lesson 2

September 12th, 2009

As I discussed in our last post I am going to show you what is important in your Web Stats and how to analyze them to make improvements to your marketing efforts.

Remember…

a) Log into your hosting account’s C-Panel
b) Click on your Web/FTP Stats.
c) Choose any of the Stat options, however I use Awstats.

Scroll down past the Monthly and Daily visit stats and soon you will see…

Robots/Spiders Visitors

You want to be sure your site is being visited by Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing and other major search engines. If your site is not visited by them frequently then you will not be moving up in the search engines.

Here “Hits” is the same as in the Monthly Visitor stats so this is not an indication of how many times the search engine has hit your site. The “Last Visit” column is what you should keep your eye on. It is not uncommon for a site to be visited every day when you are making changes to the content on the sales page or to your blog or articles pages that are linked to your sales page.

Fresh content is the key to bringing back the Robots and Spiders on a regular basis. This will move your site up the organic searches on the search engines if your fresh content is relevant to the keywords you are marketing for.

Be sure to use an XML sitemap on your website so that your blog posts will be indexed by the search engines. Also be sure to add the Articles Page to your website like we discussed on pages 85-87 of The Beginner’s Guide to Online Success!

The common term for “fresh content” is Spider Food. Be sure to feed your spiders often!

Look for my next post on Visit Duration.

How to Use Your Web Stats – Lesson 1

September 9th, 2009

Do you have too much traffic to your website?

I know, what an odd question, does anyone ever have too much traffic?

Actually, the answer is yes! You could be getting great streams of traffic BUT if they are not converting to sales then you are getting the wrong kind of traffic.

Kind of like an Open House, lots of Lookey-Loos but no cash on the barrel head.

Now is the time to take a look at where your traffic is coming from. Over the next several posts I am going to show you what is important in your Web Stats and how to analyze them to make improvements to your marketing efforts.

a) Log into your hosting account’s C-Panel

b) Click on your Web/FTP Stats.

c) Choose any of the Stat options, however I use Awstats.

Your screen is going to be filled with a world of information but don’t let your eyes cross yet. On the left side of the screen you will see a list of options for calling up the data. For now click on the Summary view.

Take your right hand scroll bar and just start moving down the page. You will see different boxes of information. Here is what to focus on…

Monthly History

Unique Visitors is the number of visitors that came to your site usually within a 24 hour period. If the same person comes back in hour 25 then they are counted again. This is the most important number because it acts truly like a body count.

Number of Visits is the number of visits a Unique Visitor came to your site in that 24 hour period. This is something to keep an eye on because it will show whether a visitor was coming back to your site, perhaps for a second look at the sales letter or because they are comparing your product to others.

Pages are the number of pages the Unique Visitors reviewed. These are not important to our analysis.

Hits is hard to define but it is the number of graphics and items that load when a visitor comes to the page. This is not useful for our marketing purposes.

Bandwidth is the amount of digital traffic your site did in this month. Keep an eye on this as sometimes your webhost only offers you a limited bandwidth and you will have to increase your service level if you cross over your limit.

In the end focus on your Unique Visitors – this number should grow every month. Your PPC campaign, backlinks and search engine ranking will improve this number. Unique Visitors are a direct correlation to the amount of work you are doing in getting traffic to your site.

You will use this number to determine the number of visitors that become buyers of your product; your “conversion rate.” For example…If I have 1,000 Unique Visitors in December and I have 100 sales in December then my conversion rate is 10%.

Any number of 5% is good; anything over 20% is fantastic. (Don’t forget to do the dollars math, 100 sales for a $19.95 product is $1,995 in your pocket!!!)

Work on this number, it will be slow at first but it will improve with effort! When you are first starting an online business these numbers will be small but they will grow, manage them now to get the most out of your traffic.

Check back here in a few days to see more in our series of How to Use Your Web Stats where we will discuss Robot and Spider Visits.