Web Site Analytics

We offer help in both the setup, and analysis of web site analytics. Our favorite free analytics tool is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free to use, it just takes a few hours to setup, and what it allows you to do is see who is visiting your site, the number of visits, what search phrases they came in on, what location, what website referred them, what search engine, you can compare rends over time, and a whole host of other features. Two other tools we use to view stats are awstats, and webalizer. Both of these come installed on all of our hosting plans, there is nothing to setup. Learn more about Google Analytics here.

Conversion Goals

Another useful tool of analytics is the ability to setup a conversion goal. For example, one of this site's goals is to get you to contact us for a quote. Once you fill out the quote form, you are taken to a page called thankyou.html which is thanking you for contacting us. We have a conversion goal setup within Google Analytics to give us stats on the number of successful conversions from different parts of our web site. You might think it's enough to get the contact, but we want to know what pages you visited before contacting us. this is just one of the many conversion goals that can be setup. Another goal might be to get you to signup for a newsletter or twitter.

Reading Web Logs, and Web Statistics

Log in to your control panel: www.yourdomain.com/cpanel

1. Click on Tools in the top menu
2. First option is Web/FTP Stats, click to view
3. Click on Analog
4. Choose a month to view
5. Click on Search Word Report
a. These are the top words, how people actually found your site
6. Look just below the pie chart, to view the top 30 words used to find your site

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Click on the tools menu again, to FTP/Web Stats, and then click on Awstats
The first number in Orange is the Total Unique Visitors. This tells you not the total visits, but individual people that made it to the site. This number is typically the most indicative of actual traffic.

Just below that you can view the unique visitors for the last 12 months, for comparison

Scroll down to “Robots/Spiders”
This tells you when the Google robot was last at your site to index your pages
Visit Duration: If 90% of your hits are less than 30 seconds, chances are that person clicked away before reading anything, time to find out why.

Top 25 pages: This tells you what the popular pages of your site are.

Operating system: If more than 5% of your visitors are on a Macintosh, you might consider checking to be certain the pages render correctly.

Search Key phrases: Notice the top word search, but pay attention to the “full list” the only reason the full list keywords are not hitting more, is because the site is not optimized for them very well. Assume that people *are* searching with these words, and that improvement should be made in these areas to capture more searches.

Webalizer:
Click on Month (clue highlighted links)

Total Unique referrers gives an idea to compare with the stats of unique hits found in analog stats. This number is low, but is for certain a minimum number of real visitors.

Top 30 URLs: These show the popular pages of your site, most visited.

Top ten entry pages: shows the most frequent places that people surfed into your site, and often is not the homepage. This tells you a lot about what pages are getting hit, so compare that with the top search terms, and continue to optimize here.

Referrers: this tells you who sent people to your site. If it says that Google referred 200 people this month, then it means 200 people went to Google, typed in a search term, and actually clicked through from there. This also can show you who is linking to your site, perhaps without you knowing.

Top 20 search strings: These tell you more about what people actually typed, to find your site. The number one search term here, is the most popular term at Google that finds your site. Know that you must be getting good ranking here, and be certain to optimize more, as its working!

Latest Visitors: This tab tells you the ip addresses of the last ten people on your site.
The referrer is the page they were last looking at, the Host is the computers address. The agent tells you the computers browser. MSIE stands for Microsoft Internet Explorer, AOL is America Online, and if you see Google or yahoo listed there, it probably means that a robot came to index the site. If you see a http code of 404, this means the page or image was not found, and we should fix this ASAP.

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Tools -> FTP/Web Stats -> Error Log

This tells you any errors such as missing images, missing pages, or other. If you have a question as to what this means, feel free to ask.

 

Next Steps

1. Request a Quote