7. Introducing Website Stats

Lord Kelvin is reputed to have said if you know what youre talking about and can express it in numbers then you know something about it. If you cannot express it in numbers then your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind

7.1. WHY STATS ARE VITALLY IMPORTANT EVERY DAY

The availability of stats from your website host is critical. These stats (derived from what are called logs) provide you as the website owner with vital information about your website. They are the numbers Lord Kelvin would be talking about. This is the useful information provided (and more) by log files

• Daily visitors

• Hourly visitors

• Daily number of page views

• A record of all pages visited and how often (i.e. which pages were most popular)

• Entry page and exit page

• Time visitors spent on your website

• Visits by search engine spiders

• Visitors by country (actually domain extension e.g. .com assumed to be USA)

• Referring domains

• Referring search engines (i.e. how much traffic came from each search engine)

• Referring keywords (i.e. which keyword typed into a search engine was source of the visitor)

Im sure you find all these important because they are they allow you to measure and make modifications to your website based upon what the stats tell you.

7.2. HOW YOU MIGHT USE THE STATS IN SEO

In my case the most important aspects of the stats (and in the context of this book) is the information relating to how people actually got to my site. Did they arrive via a search engine and if so which keywords were most important. I use this information in conjunction with my position on the SERPs for that keyword.

Example 1 . If 10 visitors per day reach my site via the keyword garden ponds and if Im only on page 2 of the SERPs for this keyword then I know that by getting onto page one I can expect a very significant jump in visitors for this keyword search.

Example 2 I might discover that people are reaching my site by typing in small garden ponds and yet I dont have an optimized web page for that term. This could be sufficient motivation for me to immediately create an optimized page for small garden ponds

7.3. HOW YOU MIGHT USE THE VISITOR STATS FOR IMPROVED SELLING OPPORTUNITIES

Visitor stats and PPC search marketing go hand in hand because it is possible to discover the best time of day and week for optimum traffic.

Example every Monday between 12 noon and 3 pm traffic is 25% higher than at any other time.

Surely in this scenario it would make sense to offer my specials to coincide with this increased volume of visitors. It is also a good time to bid more on keywords maybe to get into a higher position in the paid search results just for those 3 hours. At 3.01 pm I return all PPC settings to my more conservative bids.

This kind of control and feedback is just not available with ANY other form of advertising.

Your stats are like gold. Use them