March 27, 2010

Utilising Website Development Stats To Check Your Progress

Your website development is a potential gold mine. It can take your business from so-so to WOW! Statistics can help you, you just have to learn how to use them.

Website statistics can tell you a lot of things. They can show you which products are doing well and which are not. You can learn what visitors like and dislike about your website development. Are your keywords working? That needs to be explained as well.

When you start planning your business, you need to develop a business plan that will help map out where you see your sales going from one year to the next. With online businesses you can do this through website statistics. In this way, you can measure various initiatives on your site that can directly impact your business.

Your Website Statistics.

One of the things that you want is traffic. Without traffic you won’t get any sales and your business won’t grow. A marketing plan will detail how to get traffic. It’s not a foolproof way, however.

You will need to measure your efforts to see if they are working. This is where statistics come in. What do you measure? Here are a few examples:

* Unique visitors (how many different people visit your site).
* Keyword analysis (to tell you which keywords would bring in traffic).
* Conversion rates (how many visitors go from reading to buying items).
* Webpage analysis (see where visitors go to when they are in your website).
* Page views (the number of visitors to each individual page within your site).

These are just some of the statistics you should know about. When you begin marketing, the statistics can help you to see if you are on the right course.

Do your keywords drive traffic?

Statistics are gathered on a monthly basis, but it can still take a few months to see trends. Analysing a trend can show you if your current plan is working. Because of the lag time, it’s not wise to make changes to your plan for several months, to give it time to work, or not work. When starting out, it often takes that long to accurately identify sales.

Site stats give you a starting point. If you don’t have a way to measure things, you don’t know whether you’re hitting your target or missing it. Analyse everything from an overall perspective and you’ll get a better idea of what to change as you move forward.

To start off with, make sure you have a way to measure site information, right now. There are software tools (both free and paid) that can help you compile these statistics. You can also hire companies to measure that information for you and analyse the data to anticipate the next move that you need to make. But, for small online business endeavours, using software to compile the data and your own brain to analyse it will suffice.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about building success strategies that really work? Contact VMF today!

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