Suze Bragg

Who Is On My Web Site...When?
August 2, 2007

Your greatest success tool (that is unique to the Internet) is finding out who is visiting your site, when they're visiting, and what they're doing while they are there.  Why do you need it?  Without it, you're operating in a vacuum, void of knowledge about how successful you are or how successful you can be.  It's like never balancing the books in your store and guesstimating that, since you had some foot traffic last week, you should hit your budget for the month. 

Six questions you need answered:

1. Who:  who is visiting (not names) and what state/country are they from?
2. What:  what are they reading?
3. Where:  where are they browsing and looking?
4. When:  when do they visit your site / what time of the day and on what days is it the most popular?
5. Why:  why do they leave your site suddenly or why/which pages are they staying on the longest/least?
6. How:  how did they get there?  From a search engine or an affiliate site, etc.

What statistic software will not tell you are the names of people on your site and their demographic information.  This information needs to come from you when you create your newsletter mailing list or from your customer research.  If they were able to provide this, it'd be the equivalent of reaching into someone's bank account, personal information, and credit report every time they log into your web site.  Hmmm....makes me squirm just thinking about it.

Some Choices (*options for researching):

1. Your service provider (hosting company) usually provides it.  If it doesn't answer the 6 questions above, find someone else.
2. Google Analytics
3. Log Rover
4. Sawmill Lite
5. ClickTracks
6. 123Log Analyzer
7. Access Watch
8. Add Free Stats
9. AW Stats
10. Blizzard Tracker

Posted by Suze Bragg on August 2, 2007 | Comments (0)