If you’ve got any sort of website, especially one where you generate money from, it is always a good idea to track the results your website is getting. The major thing any website owner wants to know is how much traffic they’re getting, after all, without traffic all the work you’ve put into your website is virtually meaningless. However, there are other things you may want to track to give you an even better idea of how your site is doing, such as: how many pages of your site the average visitor views, how long a visitor remains on your site, where your visitor found your site, and which pages of your site are getting visitors and which aren’t.
Basic Tracking
At the most simple, many hosting companies today offer basic statistical information through free statistics programs, such as AWstats. You can easily download a complete monthly breakdown of your site’s visitors, including the total number of visitors for the month, the number of unique visitors, the number of pages visited by each on average, and bandwidth used. It’s also very easy to conduct a month by month comparison of your site, a day by day comparison, even an hour by hour comparison of average number of visitors to your site.
You also get a breakdown of visitors by country, the top 25 visitors’ IP addresses, as well as the robots which have visited your site, and how often they visit. You get to see the most popular pages of your site, as well as the most common operating systems used by your visitors and their browsers. You also get an idea of the keywords and phrases used to find your website. All in all, that’s a lot of information!
Unfortunately, not all hosts offer AWstats (if your host runs CPanel, such as HostGator, it’s fairly easy to see if you’ve got it, by checking the web/FTP stats icon). If your host doesn’t offer AWstats, you’ll probably find some other free stats program which may give you some or all of the above information.
There are also several other free statistic programs which are simple to use, and may be necessary if your host doesn’t offer good statistical feedback. One can be found at http://www.statcounter.com. Statcounter allows you to paste a piece of code onto each page of your site, which is completely invisible to the viewer, but which collects important information. Much of the information gleaned from a program such as AWstats you can get by using Statcounter. Statcounter put a limit on the log file of 100 results for free users, but for those who need more information, there are varying levels of paid account, allowing the user a log file size ranging from 10,000 to 100,000. The user’s account can be easily upgraded when the need arises.
Google Analytics is another free statistics tool, and is especially useful if you are an AdWords advertiser, as it integrates into the AdWords system, allowing users to track their conversion rates. Even if you’re not an AdWords advertiser, Google Analytics is a fantastic program and it’s free. The only thing is you may have to wait some time before you’re accepted into the Analytics program.
You will that Google Analytics is a very comprehensive statistics program. Nothing you’d expect from a free service. Not only do you get a detailed listing of your web site stats, you can also set ‘goals’ to track conversion rates. For example, you can set a Goal 1 to have been achieved when your visitor reaches your ‘thank you for subscribing’ web page. It’s fantastic and I highly recommend you use it.
Advanced Tracking
Once you’ve got an idea of where your visitors are coming from, how they’re finding your site and what your conversion rates are, it’s important to carry out testing to determine the effectiveness of your current site layout or structure for converting visitors into either buyers of your products, signups to your mailing list or newsletter, or visitors who click on your AdSense ads.
There are several things you need to test to determine what works best for your site in terms of conversion, these may include: headlines you use on your salespage, your sales copy, offers you use to get people to sign up for your mailing list, the affiliate programs you’re promoting, or the color and position of your AdSense.
An effective way of doing this is with split testing software. Split testing software makes it easier to compare variations in your site’s layout or content, without spending weeks testing and tweaking each single factor.
One such piece of software is Split Test Accelerator which allows you to run at least 15 split tests in 10% of the time it would take to do your testing manually. It’s quite an expensive piece of software, though.
If you’re after something cheaper, I’ve been quite happy using AdTrackz.
Why use split testing? Because it’s one of the fastest ways to determine which sales copy will give you the best results or which colors are most effective at getting visitors to stay on your site (or whatever your desired outcome may be). It’s almost impossible to predict what’s going to work and what won’t, and many users of split testing software have reported improvements of 100% or more in their site’s results extremely quickly.
Don’t underestimate the power of tracking your site stats and also tracking every change you make to your site. The results of your tracking can surprise you.
