What, You're Not Paying Attention to Your Site's Stats?‏

by Chris Crum

Let's assume you are running one of the businesses that actually has a website (a less common phenomenon than one might think). It's great that you've gone that far, but are you keeping track of your stats? If not you may be missing out on more sales.

Evaluating Your Best Traffic Sources

When you keep track of your web statistics, you can analyze where most of your traffic is coming from, whether it be from search engines, forums, social networks, other sites linking to you, or people coming directly to your site.

As far as traffic from search engines, you can find out what keywords people are searching for to find your site. From there you can evaluate if these are the keywords you want to be found for. Analyzing this is an important step when optimizing your site. You may be getting traffic for keywords that hadn't even occurred to you.

Figuring Out Potential Sources to Improve Upon

Looking at where your traffic is coming from can be a much needed wake up call that you are not putting enough effort into other potential traffic sources. Does the majority of your traffic come from search engines? It's great that you're getting found there, but maybe you're not getting enough local traffic. Maybe you're getting a lot of traffic from forum posts, but no one is searching for what you're selling and finding you. Perhaps it's time to step up your search engine optimization efforts.

Analyzing where your traffic is coming from can help bring some clarity to what you need to do to get more business from the web. Once that clarity is realized, you can spend time trying to achieve some kind of balance among your online marketing efforts.

Web Analytics Resources

If your knowledge is limited in the area of analytics, this article from SEO expert Dave Davies is a great crash course on the subject.

I'm not going to get into all of the available web analytics tools out there. I'm sure you're perfectly capable of finding them on your own (Dave discusses a few in his article anyhow).

I couldn't even begin to scratch the surface of all of the available web analytics discussion out there, but I know one good blog to keep up with industry news is the Web Analytics World blog by Manoj Jasra. You could no doubt find other good blogs on the subject via Technorati.

I do not consider myself an expert on web analytics by any means, but I recognize the importance of them, and it is apparent that many business owners don't (including many that have websites), and it is my intention to spread awareness to "in the dark" business owners who may be missing out on business that they didn't know was there. So if you're not paying attention to your site's stats, START!