Your Website - Know Your Visitors

By:Nick Wood

You website, your shopfront if you like, is sitting there proudly in cyberspace attracting, you hope, relevant and motivated customers. Do you really know who is visiting your site, where they are from, and what they look at? No, well let us explore this now.

Even if you are not the person in charge of administering your site, you can (and should) still take an active interest in the statistics available regarding it. You do not have to be a geeky webmaster type to do this, a few simple clicks and you will have an abundance of information at your fingertips.

There are two main providers of web statistics. This article is not about promoting either one of them, and I only mention them so you can explore further if you wish. One is called Webalizer and the other is Modlogan. Chances are that you will find access to one or both of these outfits through your web hosts control panel. There are other statistics providers out there, some who focus on your sites ranking beside all others, but for the purposes of this article, let us base our discussion on these ones.

How many people visit your site, and when do they do it?
Probably the first set of figures you will come across in one of these reports is a daily, even hourly, break-up of visits to your site. You can look at the current month and see in figure and graph form how many visits your site has received as say between ten pm and 11pm last Saturday night. Rather than micro analysing like this, you may find more benefit by looking at the monthly trends.

For example, do you get more visitors on the weekends? If so, how does this relate to when your sales and sales enquiries appear? If Mondays are hectic in your office, is it because al heap of potential customers ask questions or make orders on a Friday night and Saturday morning? If so, would it be a good idea to staff your office on Saturdays to more quickly process orders and respond to enquiries?

When people visit your site, how long do they stay and where do they look?
The next set of figures and graphs will answer these questions for you. There laid out for you on a monthly basis is information telling you which page or pages your customers saw first, and exited via. It also tells you how long on average they spent on your site. Have a look here as often there are some surprises. I guess it is reasonable to assume that your home page would be the one primarily driving people to your site, but this may not be the case.

What if it is the FAQ page, or your sitemap instead? Just empowering yourself with this information can lead to tailored upgrades to your pages; pages that your customers like and use. Also useful is to see what page your visitors usually use to exit your site. Is it what you expected? Could they be abandoning your pages at this spot, because this one particular page had a negative effect? Another great lead for a tailored review of your site.

Where do my visitors come from?
Do not ignore this part of the statistical report. Again it is typically in table and graph form, collated on a monthly basis. Say you sell refrigerators in Houston Texas. You see that you get one thousand hits per day on your site, great! However you see that nearly 15% of those hits come from people living in say Canada, India and the Pacific Islands. Are they likely to convert their surfing on your site into a purchase of a fridge in Houston? I think not. So what can you do with this information? Well you can review your site keywords for a start. If for example you have broad keywords like refrigerator or refrigeration, then search engines may have lees reason to screen your results out when responding to a keyword query from someone anywhere.

However if you narrowed your keywords by adding Houston to each one, then you will find that more real potential customers will be directed to your site. I should add that, depending on what you sell, worldwide reach might not be a problem at all. If you market e-books for example, then there's no bulky product to deliver, in fact no shipping at all. In that case you are just as well off reaching out to customers everywhere, regardless of where they call home.

Good luck with exploring your website statistics. It really is worth it!

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