How Web Analytics Help.

Web analytics is the study of the behavior of website visitors.

In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.--Wilkipedia.com

We live in the information age and analytics are a great information gathering tool. Unfortuanatly, some people beleive that the more hits you get the more conversions you get. Not necessarily! What is the point of having a million visitors to your website a day yet only 5 people actually decide to purchase your products. You optimize your website for search engines and you run a pay per click campaign. Your daily visitors increase and your website is getting traffic and you think it's the solution to all your problems. No, we still have the pesky little problem of converting that traffic into sales or newsletter sign-ups or whatever type action you want visitors to take. This is where analytics swoop in and save the day.

In order to have your online business succeed, it is vital to understand exactly how your website works and where the weak points are situated. Having a web analytics solution can help you in developing strategies to acquire new visitors, retain existing visitors, understand visitor paths, understand visitor behavior, search terms and the search engines that drive your traffic, pages that are visited most, main exit pages, and maximazation of your profit.

With a Web Analytics solution:

• Monitor where your traffic is coming from (IP Addresses)
• Track unique visitors and how many sessions they have.
• View the path of your visitors (Time spent on each path and the sequence of browsing)
• See what were the top entry pages, top exit pages and how many files they downloaded
• See what pages are giving you referral traffic
• View which search engines are referring traffic, and which search terms are providing traffic.
• You can see the demographics of your visitors.
• Track referrals and affiliates that provide traffic to your site.

Once a complete analysis of the user behavior has been completed, decisions can be made for your marketing strategy. After the in-depth web log analysis is complete, any changes to the website can be made in order to ensure you don't lose visitors who may be interested in your product or service.