As a website owner, you would want to analyze the progress of your website in terms of who is visiting it and how many times. This information would help you improve your website. However, to fetch this information, you would need a web analytics tool. Although, you could find all such information the log file; it can be a tedious task to read through a log file that has so many records in it. A web analytics tool serves as an ideal utility to explain you the traffic flow of your website with simple and sorted data. Web analytics is a useful exercise and you must know how to use it. Following is the description of 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 all the collected and transformed data, you can easily proceed with your analysis now. This is arguably the most interesting part of your web analysis campaign. You need to identify a trend in the traffic flow. Following points would help you do just the same.
Is there a specific time when most of your visitors visit your website? What are the most visited pages of your website? How many pages does an average user view before quitting your website? On an average, how long do your visitors stay at the website? Does your traffic come from the search engines? What are the most common pages that most of visitors exit your website from? Who is linked up 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 would need to repeat the above discussed procedure on regular basis. This procedure is an ongoing exercise that you must do always.