Advice: The Wonders of Web Site Statistics
Can I say, absolutely first up, what a joy it is to write about the importance of statistics – firstly because my high school maths teacher would be extremely proud of me for finally ‘getting it’, and secondly because it’s a word I hardly use in conversation, since it’s a word that I find very hard to pronounce! I almost always end up throwing an extra ‘s’ in there, to make it like ‘stastistics’ – and I’m now very sorry if I’ve just encouraged you to follow my bad habits.
Onwards…
You know that I love to talk about marketing, especially for small businesses and solo business people – and, in general, how important it is, but in a ‘big cloud’ kind of way. That’s because marketing is vital for any business – it’s simply the act of getting your name out there in a controlled and positive way.
Nine times out of ten, though, marketing is almost impossible to measure: apart from focus groups, surveys and TV ratings, any effort you spend on marketing tends to pay off as a rather long term positive ‘aura’ surrounding your business. It’s all a bit ‘woofy’, but it does add up eventually.
Enter web site statistics: whether you have a tiny one-page ‘contact me’ web site, or a small brochure online, or a larger ecommerce or content-based web site, every person that visits your web site leaves their own individual, indelible mark.
Don’t panic – any one person can’t be identified exactly, but an awful lot can be inferred from the patterns of even just a few site visitors over time, and an awful lot more can be inferred from the patterns of many hundreds or thousands of visitors to your site, giving you – and this is important – absolute knowledge of the effectiveness of your web site, and absolute knowledge of the location, size and trends of your market.
Interested in learning more then? I thought so – you don’t hear the words ‘absolute’ and ‘marketing’ together very often!
The 4 Kinds of Web Site Statistics
There are four distinct levels of web site statistics out there in the marketplace, to cater for basic, intermediate, advanced, and expert analysis of your site and market – the good news is that three out of those four are available free of charge.
We’ll start with the most common ones, and work up to the paid one…
LEVEL ONE: Your own web site’s log file.
Cost: Free – basic to intermediate marketing use.
Whether you’re aware of it or not, every company who hosts web sites also keeps logs of who’s been where – hopefully you’ve been made aware of it by your hosting company, if not, go looking!
These statistics show you the pages on your site that are the most popular, and the number and frequency of visitors per hour, day, month and year – and more importantly, they show you how people find your site by listing the pages visitors were at immediately preceding the page they came to on your site.
This ‘referrers’ table tells you the proportion and scale of visitors finding your site via search engine vs. via third-party links vs. via a visitors typing in your web address directly.
Whether you spend money on search engine optimisation techniques, or search engine marketing (more on *those* topics in a later month!) the biggest factor in your marketing spend is that one direct hit is worth many hundreds or thousands of search engines referrals, because it means that your own marketing is working all by itself, unaided by spending big on Google Ads!
LEVEL TWO: Instantaneous Stats
Cost: Free (statcounter.com) – basic marketing use
Services like the free statcounter.com web site analysis package compromise on sophistication and the ability to analyse trends, but add the element of ‘real time’. The the very second someone hits a paae on your site, you can refresh the statcounter report page and see which page was visited, what general part of the world that person came from, and what web page or web site they came from before yours.
The service is set up by installed a few lines of invisible HTML code (as provided by statcounter) to the bottom of each of your web pages. If your site uses any form of template or global footer, then you’ll only have to do this in the one place, otherwise, it’s a quick task for your friendly neighbourhood web developer.
The benefit of this real-time nature is that you can quickly assess the effectiveness of any marketing campaigns you’re running, and you can quickly spot any broken links or dead areas of your site if you’ve just made changes. As a tool for developing web sites for folks like me, I find it invaluable – you can shut the door *as* the horse is bolting, not weeks after – er, so to speak.
LEVEL THREE: Long term trends and analytics
Cost: Free (Google Analytics) – advanced marketing use
For long-term analysis of the trends of visitors to your site, or trends in the success or failure of search engine optimisation, or for measuring the success of a specific marketing campaign, there’s none better than Google’s own (free) Analytics web site.
Sign up at http://www.google.com.au/analytics, then as above with statcounter.com, you can get a snippet of code to place at the base of your web pages. Google Analytics is only refreshed once a day, and usually at midnight in the USA, so almost 36 hours ‘afterwards’ for us. In that way, Statcounter and Google Analytics work perfectly fine side by side, and compliment each other nicely.
The two major benefits of the Analytics package are:
- Gorgeous (beautiful!) charts describing every conceivable metric/measure/facet of the ups and downs of your pages/visitors/referrers/whatever – AND going back in history as far ago as you first set up the service, so you can compare season on season or year on year. You can even compare multiple sites that you own against each other.
- Analytics aslo has a way of effectively putting a dollar value next to an ‘event’ that your visitors undertake on your web site. That is, you set up a ‘watch’, and if an ‘event’ happens (someone buys something, or signs up for a newsletter, or happens to read the entire site, for example) then you can allocate a nominal dollar value to that ‘event’. No-one gets paid any money – it’s simply a way of putting a real-world dollar value next to a virtual event, so you can then monitor the trends of how the ‘value’ of your site fluctuates.
All in all, Google Analytics is slight overkill – more stats that you’d ever need – but there are key measures up front, and lesser-used metrics tucked away until you really need them.
LEVEL FOUR: Competitive Analysis
Cost: definitely not free (Hitwise) – expert level marketing analysis
OK – I’ll keep this brief, because deep pockets are required to some extent: essentially, hitwise.com.au is a Melbourne company, but the global leader in measuring your site against all other sites in your market. Not only do you get to see trends of your own web site, but you get to keep a watch on your competitors, and see how your industry is growing against other industries, for example. Very. Powerful. Stuff. Not. Cheap. Enough. Said.
Cool…?
Have I freaked you out yet? It’s actually not scary stuff, and it really *is* important – for the first time in marketing history, there is definitive way to measure the success/failure/growth of your online marketing efforts – it takes some experience to ‘read the tea leaves’ if you’re deeply into the world wide web, but even if you’re only small (and that’s most of us!) then knowing what is and what isn’t working on your web site is the first step to making your marketing effort a whole lot better…
So go on, check out your hosting providers’ stats, and either way, sign up for Google Analytics this week, so that you can start gathering great statistics for future trend watching. Go on – right now!
AB out