Released on = June 25, 2007, 10:16 am

Press Release Author = Allison Hope

Industry = Marketing

Press Release Summary = So you've launched your website and you're happy with the
content, the design, and with its placement in cyberspace. Now, it's time to track
your traffic. How many people visit your site each month? Where are they coming
from? What do you need to know to be an informed analyzer so you can beef up your
site traffic? And what tools can help you along the way? Ladies and gentlemen, sit
back, relax, and enjoy the following answers to all these questions.

Press Release Body = So you've launched your website and you're happy with the
content, the design, and with its placement in cyberspace. Now, it's time to track
your traffic. How many people visit your site each month? Where are they coming
from? What do you need to know to be an informed analyzer so you can beef up your
site traffic? And what tools can help you along the way? Ladies and gentlemen, sit
back, relax, and enjoy the following answers to all these questions.


Why You Should Know Your Dinner Guests

Knowing where your visitors are coming from and knowing where they go on your site
are the two most important pieces of acquisition arsenal you can obtain. This is
because on one hand, knowing where people are coming from will help you focus your
offsite advertising and marketing plans. On the other hand, and knowing how visitors
navigate within your site will help you gauge what pages work and which ones need to
be revamped. Maybe you have important content that would be most appealing to your
visitors but it is difficult to get to due to poor design choices and hence no one
is going to that page. You can use metrics to figure out what pages are most
popular. That is the best way to understand what type of content and design works
and will guide the future development plans for your site. The main goal is to
reduce what are know as the dreaded "bottlenecks," pages of your site where visitors
exit before they reach your purchase or sign up page.


Know the Ingredients

First, acquaint or reacquaint yourself- as the case may be- with the terminology so
that you know what you are actually analyzing. If you know that unique visits is
distinct from unique visitors, for instance, you will have a better grasp of what
figures to use for reporting purposes, setting advertising rates, and a host of
other options specific to your company's needs. Learn what an entry point means and
where people travel to once on your site. Some tools, like Webalizer, allow you to
see what URL people visited before coming to your site. This is an excellent way to
learn more about your audience and perhaps point you towards potential advertising
or link exchange opportunities.


Know the Recipe

Analytics tools can be tricky. The most important research you can do is to find out
how each metrics system calculates its findings. For instance, the company I work
for employs several reporting tools to track traffic to the site. When we first
started using these tools, we were very confused. Google Analytics told us a very
different figure for unique visitors than Webalizer did. In fact, Google's figures
were just about half that of Webalizer! After further investigation, we learned that
Webalizer was picking up on traffic behind our paywall where Google was unable to
track. Some worthy reporting tools that you should check out include AWstats and
WWWstats. AWstats presents their data in an easy-to-digest format and tells us
things like usage by the hour and a breakdown of what countries our visitors are
from. WWWstats presents the data in a pretty raw format, but allows you to track
things like transfers by client domain and transfers by URL or section. Both of
these services provide fairly reliable information.

Google Analytics is an extensive - and free! - program that can help you measure
just about anything on your site. This includes conversion tracking, which allows
you to follow a visitor from the point of entry on your site to each subsequent page
that he/she visits. This is an outstanding way of gauging your site's navigability
index and where work needs to be done to maximize the user experience (and attract
more traffic to places on the site where you want visitors most). You can also track
how your keywords are performing on the major search engines. Google's reporting
tools, though respectable, can be confusing to use. It is not entirely clear how to
access certain tools and, although they offer video instruction for some of their
services, if you have specific problems or questions, an actual customer service
person is difficult to nearly impossible to contact.

Crazyegg.com is another lesser known tool for tracking your traffic. Though there is
a fee to participate, you can try their services for free. They offer a full service
program for setting up, deploying and tracking tests, advice on how to properly
track click-throughs, live reports, and easy-to-read results. Hey, you have nothing
to lose so it's worth trying a free test. Be sure to also check out these other good
sites that offer reporting and analysis for your traffic: Clicktracks.com,
Fireclick.com, NetTracker.com, and WedTrends.com.

Taste the Results

Perhaps the best way to gauge your traffic more accurately is to look at several
different reporting tools and make an educated guess. More likely than not, the
actual number of visitors to your site- much like the truth between the claims made
of two feuding parties- will lie somewhere in between.

Remember, the web is still in its infancy in many ways and there is no one,
overarching, epistemologically respectable reporting tool currently available that
beats out all the rest. The existing tools may change as our understanding of the
web becomes more comprehensible or if sites become standardized or regulated in some
way. But for now, use the tools I've recommended coupled with your best judgment and
you will be on your way to making your site the best it can be.


Web Site = http://

Contact Details = clicksector@gmail.com