Posts Categorized ‘Web Tracking’

Nov 4

Sandra

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Traffic is not enough

Hits on your website are not everything.

I worked for a company where the goal I was given was a measurement of unique visitors per day but I disagreed with the goal.

I understand the reasoning – more hits means more potential customers right? Not necessarily. Targeted traffic is much better as those visitors are more likely to be interested in your product.

If you are a new business starting out, my advice is to concentrate on the longer tail keywords as you need to use your website to either provide sales or leads. Concentrating your time on targeting generic keywords may mean a lot of time is spent on promoting your website to an audience who are not likely to buy anything from you.

Let’s take an example of a ficticious used car dealer in Essex. Would the phrase “used cars” be worth chasing? Granted it will be a massive search term, but if someone in Cornwall was looking for a used car, are they going to drive all the way to Essex just because it tops the search engine? It would be very unlikely.
So, optimise for the longer tail phrases such as “used cars in Essex”, “used cars in Colchester”, “used cars in Chelmsford”, “used ford essex”.
Think about your customers and how they will search, and based on that information you should choose your keyphrases.

A used car dealer that get’s hits to their website from all over the UK loses a massive chunk of their visitors because they are not close enough to the car dealer in Essex. Therefore the number of website hits is misleading because they will not be able to convert a lot of those visitors to customers, and by ignoring the longtail phrases that are more likely to convert to customers, the used car dealer can be losing out on potential customers.

So, in summary, it is important to understand where your website hits are coming from and whether that traffic can be proffitable to you. If it isn’t, it’s time to consider if you are targeting the right keyphrases.

Oct 30

Sandra

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Damn Lies and Web Statistics

There are lots of different website statistic packages available for webmasters to use to monitor the use of their websites. But do you know what you are measuring?

There are many different ways of measuring people’s use of your website including pageviews, visitors and unique visitors. Some people only care about showing the biggest numbers to their visitors so will show a visitor count based on pageviews, but is that really how you should measure your traffic?

You shouldn’t use a stats package to show off to others on the internet – it should be used to understand your own visitors. Google Analytics is free to everyone and offers an excellent analysis of your site. Not only that, you can choose to exclude IP addresses. I would always suggest blocking your own IP address to make sure you don’t get artificially inflated figures.

Learning to use Google Analytics to your advantage can take time as there is a lot of information to take in. You need to take time to understand what the different metrics are telling you.
For example, if you have a page that has a high bounce rate*, you can deduce that either the user found what they required on that page so didn’t need to visit any more pages, or more likely the page didn’t answer their query so they just left the site.
It is then down to you to analyse your page and decide if the content is wrong, the keywords you are targeting are wrong etc.

You need to be aware that Analytics will not tell you what to do – only what is happening!

If you only use one stats package, I would suggest using Google Analytics. If you need help analysing the results, there are lots of web professionals out there who use this package everyday. All new websites that are built by SpiderServe incorporate a Google Analytics account.

*Bounce rate – people enter the website on that page and then leave without navigating away from that one page.

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