Using The Web Analytics

In case you have a website, and want to know who is visiting it, you will need a web analytics tool. Of course, you could directly check the log and understand the behavior of users on your website. However, if there are too many records to read through, it can be a daunting task. A web analytics tool is a perfect piece of software that will give you the regular reports about who is visiting your website and how many times. You however need to know, how to use this utility effectively. Following is the explanation of the same.

Firstly, you need to collect the data. In case you have a web analytics tool, it may well be collecting all the logs for you. You must remember to include all the parts of your website that may be collecting the data. Such parts may include CGI logs, Web logs, forms (email requests), and any other data that your website may be generating.

The next step would be to transform the collected data into an understandable format that can be manipulated further. Reviewing the log file manually could be a hectic task. A web analytics tool would serve well here, making it easy to convert the collected data into understandable data. However, if some of your data is in the non-web log format like CGI, you will need to covert it yourself.

With the collected and then transformed data, you could start your analysis. This phase of the web analytics would interest you the most. You need to understand the pattern of the traffic coming to your website. Following are the points to check for:

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?

Once you have completed the analysis of your website, you need to asses the reports and set new bench marks for the improvement. You must make action plans and execute them well. You may want to add more business ads to your hot pages, and promote the pages that are not very frequently viewed. Identify the weak points and improve upon them. Your aim must be to cash in on your strong points, and improve on the weak ones.

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.

You would need to repeat the above discussed procedure on regular basis. This procedure is an ongoing exercise that you must do always.