A website owner would know the significance of web analytics. You need to keep a track of number of people visiting your website, to do well with your website. To be able to do it, you would need a web analytics tool. One option would be to read through the log file. It is however a huge hard work to review the log book manually, for there may be so many records in it. For this reason, a web analytics tool is the right choice for you. With this tool, you would get clear and simple reports about your website traffic flow. You must know how to proceed with your web analytics and below is your guide to accomplish the same.
The first thing that you need to do is collect the data. If you have web analytics tool handy, it would take care of the same. You must ensure that you have included all the data collecting parts of your website. These parts could be the CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and any other data that may be generated by the website.
The successfully collected data now needs to be transformed. It is certainly a huge task to review the log file manually. You are therefore required to transform the available data into user friendly data that can be manipulated at ease. You analytics tool will do this functionality as well. In case you have no web log formatted data, such as CGI; your analytic tool may not help.
With the collected and then transformed data, you could start your analysis. This phase of the web analytics would interest you the most. You need to understand the pattern of the traffic coming to your website. Following are the points to check for:
Do more visitors visit your site at a specific time? Which of your pages are the most commonly visited ones? How many pages does a visitor visit on an average? For how long does a visitor stay in the site? How much traffic do you get from the search engines? What are the exit pages of your website? Who has linked to your website?
After having done the data collection, and transformation of the same into reports, it is time to set new goals. Now that you know what your good and points are; you can build up on the good points and improve on the weak points. You may wish to add business links to your most visited pages, and promote the lesser visited pages. The idea should be to bank on your strengths to achieve more, and lift up your weakness to convert them into strengths.
Your visitors must know what changes you have made to your website. For this, you will need to promote your website in a way that your updates are highlighted. Unless people know about the improvements, it serves no good.
You must repeat the above process time and again. This is in fact, a continual process that you must do.
