Step 12 - Visitor Analysis
Introduction
Do you get intimated by these jargons: "visitor analytics,” "referrers,” and “conversions.”
Although these words may seem to come out of a "techno bible,” the truth is, the concepts of
measuring who is visiting your site are very similar to measuring the results of any direct
marketing campaign. When you spend a great deal of time and effort selecting your
keywords, optimizing your pages, and building links to your site, you don't want to be left in
the dark about how your search engine optimization campaign is progressing. Running
ranking reports can alert you to any new algorithm changes and can give you a good idea
about your competitors' strengths; however, the ranking reports will not tell you anything
about who is visiting your site.
While monitoring your search engine ranking is very important to stay up-to-date on any
fluctuations in your site's ranking, it's only one half of the story. The other half of the story is
what happens after someone clicks on your URLs in the search results. If you don't know the
answer, you owe it to yourself to invest in a server log or tag based visitor statistics tool that
can give you powerful insights into your online marketing campaigns' performance.
The advantages of visitor analysis tools
If you don't use some type of web visitors’ analytics tool, you are most likely to have no idea
how many visitors come to your site and which search engines referred those visitors.
Without these vital statistics, how can you effectively improve your website's ranking and
profitability?
Today's modern web analytic tools can provide a wealth of valuable information that can not
only report basic user, referrer, and site usage information, but it can also report specific
actions users have taken on your site.
Moreover, visitor statistics tools can even tell you if a "conversion" has resulted from a
specific search query used to send a visitor to your site from the search engines. You are
probably already familiar with the word "conversion,” but in the context of visitor statistics, it
may mean something completely different from what you think. A "conversion" is any action
a user takes on a website. Actions can range from signing up for a newsletter, downloading,
or completing a purchase on the site. Conversion improvements are one of the fundamental
goals of visitor statistics tools.
We can break down the advantages of visitor statistics tools into these important categories:
- Basic website statistics, including the number of unique and returning
visitors to your site by hours, day, month or year. This is the minimum
requirement for any serious visitor statistics systems. Accurate numbers on visitor
traffic volumes is key to your optimization efforts and can set a baseline for
targeting new keywords or launching other web promotion campaigns.
- Gathers referrer data of every visitor, and further breaks down the reports
by search engines and keywords used. This is probably the single most used
report by search engine marketers. It's a wonderful feeling to see your optimization
efforts paying off by seeing hard evidence, your site is being found on the search
engines using your target keywords.
- Demographic analysis provides answer to the question, "where are my
visitors coming from?" The website visitors can literally leave a trail of evidence
behind them about their location and their PC's configuration. A good analytics
package should be able to report not only the IP address of the visitors accessing
your site, but the actual location, down to the city and state level.
- Live reporting of visitors on your site. It's not an absolute requirement, but if
you are investing in pay-per-click campaign and testing new keywords, it's essential
to get an immediate picture of how well your PPC campaigns are doing. You can
analyze in real time how different groups of visitors respond to your campaign
landing pages, page layouts, offers and discounts.
- Reports page views, bounce rates and visitor click paths. Increasing your
website's "stickiness" is achieved through improved usability and publishing great
content. The more pages your visitors "see,” the higher the page views score will
be. The bounce rate is the measure of a single page load. This could be the home
page or any other page on your site. A bounce is said to occur when a visitor exits
you site from the same page he entered on. Higher bounce rate means, the site has
some navigational flaws or doesn't have the right appeal to get visitors to click
through to other pages.
The click paths can pinpoint confusing page layouts and unappealing content pages.
Determining which pages on your site help your bottom line and which ones hurt
your profitability is very important. By studying the most common exit paths from
your site, you can quickly discover which pages are driving people away from your
site.
- Conversion reporting helps to continually improve search engine marketing
and increase your bottom line. Web statistics systems should be able to monitor
both organic and PPC referrer results and separate them into drill down reports. A
further segmentation of the organic and PPC results is necessary by search engine
and keyword to get a complete picture of your search engine marketing ROI
breakdown. Getting a glimpse into which campaigns are successful and which
aren't, from email and online advertising to affiliate and partner programs, is also
an important consideration. You can achieve substantial increase in web site
conversion by finding out the conversion rates for each page, path, and conversion
scenario.
Conclusion
There is a wealth of information buried in your web server logs about your visitors and their
navigational patterns. Most importantly, you want to identify trends in your website's traffic
which can be traced back to your search engine optimization campaigns. This is important
because optimizing your site for the right keywords can make all the difference in your
website's success. The higher your site ranks for well targeted keyword phrases the higher
your website traffic will climb. Remember, traffic alone is nothing without persuading your
visitors to take some favorable action on your site with well laid out design and clear
compelling content.
For more information on visitor analysis tools, please visit this list of commercial log analysis
products. The Google directory category covers most of the popular visitor statistics tools
that are available for tracking your visitors. Google also offers its own visitor tracking
solution for free called Google Analytics. It's a very well designed package and recent
improvements had made it an almost unbeatable option for visitor analysis. The only
drawback is the delay in reporting is over 24 hours, which makes real-time analysis
impossible. If you need a live visitor statistics program without any reporting delay, you may
want invest in a top-notch visitor statistics program such as web-stat.com. You can even use
both tools side-by-side giving you the ultimate tool in website traffic analysis.
Final Thoughts
What do you think? Can you apply what you have learned on these pages in your own web
promotion campaign?
We hope we have made it crystal clear— there are no secrets in SEO no matter how many
20 page long sales letters you receive trying to sell you the "ultimate secret" to top ranking.
These are just people masquerading as SEO experts, but they are not interested in your
success. We can guarantee you that!
The bottom line is search engines need valuable websites like yours to display in their
organic search results so they can earn money from paid searches. If you build and optimize
your site with your visitors in mind, you can't go wrong. More often than not, what's good for
your website visitors is also good for the search engines. But always keep in mind, the
search engines are machines without any bias toward visual effects, so it's ok to build a
pretty site with lots of pictures and flash, but make sure you let the search engines know
what your web pages are about with an equal amount of text.
We can guarantee the most challenging part of SEO will be link building and gaining link
popularity for your site. This is especially true if you are starting with a brand new site. There
are too many conflicting opinions on which link building techniques work and which ones
don't, not to mention the commercial interest of those involved. Just think about it. Would
you not recommend directory submissions if you were an owner of a directory? Or, would
you not try to discount the risks of link buying if you were selling links and making a decent
living from it?
We tired to remain as unbiased as possible and present all points of views in this tutorial, but
we won't hide the fact that we are in the business of SEO software development, and we'd
naturally would like you to buy our software.
So now it's time for you to set the wheels in motion and have fun at it. SEO can be very
rewarding. You will know what we are talking about when you see your site slowly start
rising to the top. You will be guaranteed to feel a sense of accomplishment and victory over
your competitors, not to mention the wonders it can do for your business and organization.