50-ways-to-make-your-first-sale

Chapter 12
Learn From Web Analytics
Measuring Website Traffic
The most common “barometer” that analytics provides is that it can measure
how much daily, monthly or yearly traffic your website has. Many website
owners tend to focus on this macroscopic metric to determine how well
their site is performing. This can be a deceptive metric to focus on because
it doesn’t necessarily tell you if your site is increasing revenue, average order
size, or returning customers – which tend to be more important metrics to
watch when running an ecommerce business.
You can easily build more website traffic simply by paying for Google
AdWords traffic and send it to your home page, or by posting lots of
engaging blog posts. This doesn’t necessarily mean it will translate into sales.
The beauty of good website analytics is that it can clue you into what does
and does not work in terms of growing your online business.
Basic Analytics and Web Stat Software
Almost all websites will come with a default “website statistic” software
package that is already installed. Usually you can access these statistics
through your website control panel. The two most common web statistics
packages are Webalizer and AWStats.
Both of these web statistic packages are pretty bare bones. They will tell
you the number of visits and what the top entry pages are. They also go
into some basic geographic demographics and what websites are your top
referring sources.
The one major advantage of both Webalizer and AWStats is that is reads
your website’s log file - so it counts every visit. Other analytics packages use
a JavaScript snippet that you place on your webpages to detect traffic. These
programs only detect traffic of visitors that have JavaScript enabled – which
is approximately 95% of the internet browsing population.
Google Analytics is the most popular free JavaScript based web analytics
solutions. It provides a lot more depth and clarity as to what visitors are
doing on your website. It can detect:
• What city your visitors are from.
• Virtually unlimited amount of entry pages and exit pages.
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