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Traffic Data to Increase Sales from Your Web Site
Sites of Boston Tip
of the Month
March 2003
Table of Contents
-- WebTrends Live
-- 1) Number of Visitors
--
2) Search Phrases
-- 3) Entry Paths
-- Glossary - Cookies
WebTrends Live
Last month I talked
about WebTrends
Live which provides a straightforward and easy-to-use report of traffic
activity on your website. You can set up an account for the eBusiness Edition
of the Web Trends Reporting Service for as little as $35 per month.
The WebTrends Live
report provides many types of data. Here I identify three sets of data that are
particularly useful. For each, I describe how to interpret the data and how to
use it to improve your website.
1) Number of Visitors
In the "general statistics" section of the report are several numbers
regarding website visitors: monthly unique visitors, daily unique visitors, total
visitors, first time visitors, repeat visitors and monthly returning visitors.
Unless you use cookies* (see definition below) on your website, the only meaningful
numbers are Total Visitors.
You can track Total Visitors from month to
month to understand how many times someone visits your website. You can now quantify
the affect of your website promotion efforts.
Without a program like
WebTrends, you may be getting a count of visitors or number of hits. Number of
hits is a measure of the number of files downloaded and is generally many times
larger than the number of visitors and not a useful statistic.
2) Search Phrases
This section shows a list of key phrases that visitors used to find your website,
and the number of visitors for each key phrase. If you are optimizing your Web
site, you can see exactly how many visitors you have attracted for each of your
key phrases. The clicks from "pay per click" advertising will also be
counted on this list.
3) Entry Paths
WebTrends definition:
Path-the path followed. Pages are listed in sequence, first visited at the top.
Up to the first four pages are listed.
Each of the key phrases brings
the visitor to a specific page on your website that may or may not be the home
page. The paths in the report show the page that the visitors first saw, what
pages they viewed, and in what order.
If the visitors looked at just
one page and then left the website, you might consider some changes to that particular
page. You may want to make the links more clear to the reader, or add a link to
another website page at the bottom of the page they are reading. The more pages
they look at, the more they learn about your service and products, and the more
likely they are to contact you or make a purchase.
If you have a contact
or order form, check the paths and links on each page to be sure you are leading
your visitors to this form. If they do not see it, they will not use it. If they
are viewing that form, but not completing it, then the form needs to be modified.
Glossary - Cookies
Definition from Webopedia.com:
A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the
message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time
the browser requests a page from the server.
The main purpose of cookies
is to identify users and possibly prepare customized Web pages for them. When
you enter a website using cookies, you may be asked to fill out a form providing
such information as your name and interests. This information is packaged into
a cookie and sent to your Web browser which stores it for later use. The next
time you go to the same website, your browser will send the cookie to the Web
server. The server can use this information to present you with custom Web pages.
So, for example, instead of seeing just a generic welcome page you might see a
welcome page with your name on it.
The name cookie derives from UNIX
objects called magic cookies. These are tokens that are attached to a user or
program and change depending on the areas entered by the user or program.
More
information on Cookies
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