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Do You Use Web Analytics? [poll]

George — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:11:11 +0000

In the world of freelancing, blogging and Internet Marketing, there are many tools to use to attain the goals you set for yourself. One tool that I consider necessary is the use of Web Analytics.

The use of Web Analytics can benefit you in analyzing traffic, landing page percentages, email marketing statistics and what do you need to improve your web presence.

In a previous post, Quick Tip – Use Web Analytics to Your Advantage, I write about some tips on how to use Web Analytics to your advantage. I also have another post, Using Web Analytics: Bounce Rate, that discuss in more detail the importance of monitoring your bounce rate and it can impact your web presence. I will be writing more posts on this important subject in the near future.

Today, I would like to know if you use Web Analytics and how often do you check your stats to help improve your web presence.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Twitter Statistics

George — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:34:56 +0000

As in previous posts, I am on the Twitter train and learning more about this interesting service each day. Twitter can be used to make some great contacts and network with people that you would not have the opportunity in other arenas.

Some may hate it, some may love it. For those that love it, ever wonder if there were statistics for Twitter? Keeping track of how many tweets per month, what client you were using, who have you replied to are just some of things that you can track at Tweetstats.

I am a person that likes to have statistics to use for research and possible business opportunities. With the use of Twitter for business, I find this a very interesting and useful service.

To check it out, you can go to:

http://www.tweetstats.com

Just type in your Twitter username and watch the stats come up just for you.

You can follow me on Twitter at @gpfree

Have something to say. Let me know.

Using Web Analytics: Bounce Rate

George — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:00:32 +0000

In a previous post, Quick Tip – Use Web Analytics to Your Advantage, I went over how to use web reporting to help in targeting and reporting on your blogging success. When you study your weblog reports, you will be able to harness information to target and tweak your blog for your readers.

Bounce Rate – What is it?

When reviewing your web reports, you can see many things; you can also see something called a bounce rate on your site. This is defined as the percentage of visitors on your site that enter your site on a certain page and don’t visit any other pages on your site.

This is sometimes confused with exit rate, which is the percentage of visitors on your site that leave from a certain page based on the number of visits to that page.

Basically with exit rate, the visitor visits other pages on your site, while bounce rate is where a visitor only visits only the one page.

I will touch more on exit rate in another post in the future.

How Can a Visitor Bounce?

On your site, that particular landing page could be all the information or not the information that visitor was looking for. If it is what that person was looking for, they might go into other pages on your site. However, if it is not what they are looking for and sometimes it is, they just exit on that particular landing page.

Here are a few ways that a visitor to your site could bounce after hitting that initial landing page:

Closing the window or tab your site is loaded in.

Clicking the famous back button on their browser

Entering a new URL into their browser and navigating away from your page.

Bouncing via a session timeout. When a visitor leaves their browser on that page for over 30 minutes, it will turn into a bounce.

What is a Bad Bounce Rate?

So now that you have an understanding of bounce rate, what would be considered a bad rate?

When you look at your web report, you should take care to look at both the page and site bounce rate. Here are the measurements of bounce rate:

0 – 20% bounce rate is ideal

With a bounce rate of 30% or more should cause you to look closer at those pages.

A bounce rate of 50% or more is something you should be concerned with and look at fixing as soon as you possibly can.

Why Would Someone Bounce?

There are many reasons a visitor would bounce from your site.

On sites that are mostly informational, a high bounce rate may not be a bad thing, sometimes. When someone just wants to find specific information, some will not want to go deeper into the site after they have already found what they are looking for.

Your site may not be in the niche or subject that visitor is searching for. You may post something on creativity, which your visitor searches for, but your site is based on broader subject your visitor may not be interested in.

One big reason can be design and user experience. If you have a site that is very busy and hard to read and follow, they will not stick around. One thing to always look at is how well does your site flow. You should also look at how well your navigation is to read and flows to other pages.

Too many ads on your site would also be considered too busy and unappealing for the visitor.

Where to Go From Here

Now that you know about bounce rate and how important it is, keep a close eye on your web reports. This is the simplest way to find high bounce rates and what can be done for those pages reporting high rates.

Bounce rates and how they can impact your site is another reason to pay close attention to web analytics and reporting.

Other ways to gather data would be to implement polls, ask questions of potential customers and then analyzing that data will help you in bringing those bounce rates down and your success up!

Quick Tip – Use Web Analytics to Your Advantage

George — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:00:18 +0000

You have your blog all setup. You use great design, widgets and coding. You submit your blog to directories, post comments on other blogs and follow social networking fundamentals. Sounds like you are doing just about everything to make your blog a success, or are you?

Web analytics is a great way to see what is happening on your blog. Researching your web log reports is often an overlooked practice for some bloggers. By studying your reports, you can find a plethora of information about your readers. This can help you in making your blog more of a success. Most web hosting companies will automatically provide detailed web log reports with your hosting account. I would check with your web hosting company to see how to access your reports.

So, just what can you learn from your web analytic reports? The most basic information found is how many people are visiting your blog. Now, what other things can you find out that you can use to “tune” your blog?

Which posts are the most popular for visiting users? – You can use this to maybe write more posts on those subjects. You can also setup landing pages for more popular topics.
How long are users staying on your site? – You can check to see what amount of time users stay on particular pages of your blog. Among uses for this information could be: Users not staying on longer written posts? You can use this information to adjust your posting length or change something on those posts.
Where are your readers coming from? You can see the country, ip address and ISP where users come from. This can be handy for finding spammers. You can also make some specific content for certain regions visiting your blog.
What sites are referring to your blog? This information is very valuable. This can show you what sites are linking to you and where your readers are finding you. You can generate possibly relationships with those referring sites from this information.
What search engines are referring traffic to you? This can tell you from what search engines your readers are originating from. This will give you insight as to what keywords readers are searching for and what ranking your blog is on those search engines.

Among those listed above, there is even more information inside web logs reports that can help you with your blogging success. Viewing your web analytics data, at least once a week, will help you in targeting information out to your readers.

As I said before, usually, your web hosting company will have web reporting setup as part of your hosting plan. If you are interested in some other tools to use for web log reporting, there are many to choose from. I will just touch on a few popular ones.

Google Analytics – This is a free reporting service from Google. It is as easy as signing up with your Google account, copy and pasting some code into your site and then watching the reports from Google.

Awstats – This is an open source program that will ingest your web traffic logs and output reports with graphical charts.

Web Trends – This is an enterprise application that is a pay product. It will also ingest your logs and produce helpful information about your web traffic. Web Trends also has many other products in their line of enterprise reporting line.

Urchin – This is software from Google which is also free. It is for users that want to use their own reporting inside their corporate networks. This is another great tool for producing reports on your web traffic.