Tracking the Success of Your Web Site

by John Eberhard, 5/27/2006

Now that you have a web site and you are trying to get people to come to it and become leads, or sales, or just to use the site, it is vital to be able to measure how well you are doing each week. By watching your web site statistics, you can gauge how well each new change you make to the site or to your promotional efforts is working. You can reinforce the things that are working well and drop the things that aren't.

Following Your Statistics

It is vital to have a good statistics program to be able to track the statistics of visits to your site.

Several products I recommend are Webtrends, NetTracker, Hitbox Professional, LiveStats, and OpenTracker.

By using a good quality program you can really see what's happening with your site daily, weekly, monthly, or for even longer periods. The key statistics you want to be able to track weekly include:

1. User Sessions: This is the number of people that came to your site in a given week. Some statistics programs track the total number of User Sessions, which can include multiple sessions from one person, and others track unique User Sessions, meaning they count each user only once. I personally think total User Sessions is more valuable as a statistic, because theoretically you want people to keep coming back.

2. Page Views: This is the total number of pages that people looked at on your web site in a given period of time. This of course will always be higher than the User Sessions unless your site only has one page (I would hope it has more). Obviously, the higher the Page Views are in relation to your User Sessions, the better. That shows that people are staying on your site and looking around, not just coming to your home page and then leaving.

3. Referrals: All the higher quality statistics programs allow you to see what other web sites people are coming to you from. These could include search engines or other sites where there is a link to your site. This is probably the most important thing to monitor on your web site, because it shows you how successful your online marketing actions are.

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