As a website owner, you would want to analyze the progress of your website in terms of who is visiting it and how many times. This information would help you improve your website. However, to fetch this information, you would need a web analytics tool. Although, you could find all such information the log file; it can be a tedious task to read through a log file that has so many records in it. A web analytics tool serves as an ideal utility to explain you the traffic flow of your website with simple and sorted data. Web analytics is a useful exercise and you must know how to use it. Following is the description of the same.
To start with, you must collect the data. If you have a web analytics tool installed, it may already be doing the stuff for you. You need to include all aspects of your website that collect data. Such aspects include CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and other kinds of data that your website generates.
The successfully collected data now needs to be transformed. It is certainly a huge task to review the log file manually. You are therefore required to transform the available data into user friendly data that can be manipulated at ease. You analytics tool will do this functionality as well. In case you have no web log formatted data, such as CGI; your analytic tool may not help.
With all the collected and transformed data, you can easily proceed with your analysis now. This is arguably the most interesting part of your web analysis campaign. You need to identify a trend in the traffic flow. Following points would help you do just the same.
Do more visitors visit your site at a specific time? Which of your pages are the most commonly visited ones? How many pages does a visitor visit on an average? For how long does a visitor stay in the site? How much traffic do you get from the search engines? What are the exit pages of your website? Who has linked to your website?
You should now be setting bench marks for yourself. With all the analysis done, you know the strong and weak points of your website. You can now plan your actions and execute them to reach newer standards. For instance, you could add more business links to the pages that are frequently visited by the people, and optimize the lesser visited ones for more traffic flow. In short, you should work in a direction to capitalize on the strong aspects of your website and improve on the weaker aspects.
Your visitors must know what changes you have made to your website. For this, you will need to promote your website in a way that your updates are highlighted. Unless people know about the improvements, it serves no good.
The above process is not a one time task, but you need to perform it continuously. The task is therefore a continuous process, and needs you to spend time on it regularly.
