website traffic
Wed, Mar 24, 2010 @ 11:51am | by Cindy
There are many ways to measure the success of your website, and they don't all involve the "hits" mentioned in the previous post. Some relate almost one-to-one with your standard brick-and-mortar store success:
- Word of mouth
- How many contacts you receive via the website (email form)
- How many website-only coupons are redeemed
- Use your imagination. Place a call-to-action on your site that isn't anywhere else.
However, you may want to measure more than this, ater all, you probably spend quite a bit of money on your site, and it's the most difficult to measure success. Analyzing your website logs can provide a lot of detail about your visitors' online experience, as well as about your visitors themselves. An easy and useful tool for analyzing traffic for any site is Google Analytics. This is a free service provided by Google, requiring only a free Google Account to get started.
By placing a hidden JavaScript at the end of each web page on your site, each time the page is viewed by a visitor, all information available about that visit is collected by Google. Based on this data collected, they provide your site statistics for your study. Information includes the basics such as how many times a page is viewed, allowing you to see which pages are your most popular, but also information such as profiling your customers (location from country and state and even city, languages, browser and operating system used, speed of Internet connection, and more), visitor loyalty (how many returned to your site vs, how many were first time visitors), length of time on your site and how many pages viewed, and more. Traffic Sources analysis offers such information as how many came directly to your site and which search engines provide the most referrals, and search terms used to find your site. Content information includes top "landing" pages - the first page viewed by a visitor, as well as top "exit" pages - the last page viewed on your site. Google Analytics offers a lot more advanced information as well, but we'll get into details about all of this later.
For now, if you're not using it yet, contact your webmaster and ask them to add Google Analytics to your website. For more information about it, go here: http://www.google.com/analytics
Tue, Mar 23, 2010 @ 12:20pm | by Cindy
You've had your website for awhile, but do you know if it's being used? What do you know about your site visitors? It's known by a lot of different terms, hits, statistics, analytics, traffic analysis, visitors, but what is it really? For now we'll call it "website traffic", to define those people zooming along the Internet highway who stop by to visit your website. Let's learn a little more about these people, who they are and who we want them to be.
You know your business, you know your customers, if pressed you could probably even identify your primary target audience: perhaps it's middle-aged women on a spiritual quest; perhaps it's people headed to the beach during the summer; perhaps it's families looking for a quality education locally. While typical websites don't track gender or age, there is a lot you can learn about your visitors looking at your website traffic.
Every time a person views a page on your site, "hits" are logged to a webserver. If you know what you're looking at (or have the right tools) you can analyze these hits. You can learn things such as where your customers are, what they're looking at, what they're looking for, how long they spent on your site, even which ones used a mobile phone to view your site. Don't worry, it's not an invasion of privacy; although this information is being recorded about your surfing habits every time you visit a website, your identity is not associated with it. By looking at the volume of visits, you can learn a lot about your customers by the trends you see in your traffic logs.
Coming up next: a good (and free!) tool to use for measuring your website traffic.
Tue, Mar 9, 2010 @ 11:13am | by Cindy
While many small business owners have that nagging voice in the back of their heads telling them to build a website so they'll get more customers, it takes a little more effort than just building it. One of my clients had a book he had authored, with a couple thousand copies sitting in his garage waiting to be sold. He wanted a website to sell his book. The site turned out well, promoting the book appropriately, with excerpts and videos of how to use the book in an educational setting. The domain name was perfectly suited, matching the title of the book and also the subject matter. Google ranked it number one for a variety of searches. But the books didn't sell. Oh, he had a few sales from the Internet, but he refused to put in any more effort. He would go into schools and demonstrate his book, but wouldn't remember to tell them the web address. He had flyers and business cards, but he didn't want to spend the money to get the URL on it, not even hand-writing it on them. Despite all our conversations about it, not once did he ever make any effort to tell his customers his website existed. How are they to know they can buy his books online if he doesn't tell them? He eventually gave up on the website entirely, frustrated because although it looked good, functioned properly, advertised it appropriately and even ranked #1 in Google, it didn't succeed.
It is a common misconception to rely on search engines alone. Search engines are fabulous, they have their place, and they are necessary to the success of a website. But in reality, it's generally not what is going to drive your customers to your website. YOU need to do that. But it doesn't take much effort to make it a success; your customers want to see your website, you just need to let them know where it is. Put your website address (domain name) on:
- Business cards
- Invoices and receipts
- Printed materials (flyers, brochures, pamphlets)
- Free bookmarks or other give-aways
- A sign by your cash register
- A sign or banner on your wall
- Your store window
- The yellow pages
- Newspaper ads
- Shopping bags
- Press releases, magazine articles
- Use your imagination: t-shirts, mugs, dog leashes, Christmas cards...
Any time you mention your business name you should always have your web address listed. Every time a potential customer sees your name, you need to give them the opportunity to find your business online. To counter the above story, here's a success story from a very small effort. Winter months can be slow months for any business, so I decided to create a Facebook Fan Page for one of my retail clients. I even included it as a Facebook Fan Box Widget right on his website so people could see it. For the first two weeks he had four "fans" that were strictly friends and family (the only ones we had told). Last Friday afternoon he put a sign by his cash register that mentioned you could find him on Facebook, and by Monday morning he had 15 additional fans, and that number is steadily increasing. One little sign by the cash register is all it took to get people looking at his website. Do this yourselves!
|
