It is very important for owners of small businesses to closely monitor
their website traffic. A good understanding of your website visitors
will help you maximize the promotion and sale of your goods and services.
There is little point investing in a business website or paying monthly
business web hosting fees, unless your website in achieving the its
intended objectives.
Some business web hosting companies include free web analytic software
in their business web hosting packages. The software can also be purchased
separately.
Web
analytic software ranges from very simple tools that display basic
information from web server logs to highly sophisticated business
intelligence (BI) applications that can slice, dice, summarize and present
huge
volumes of data in understandable graphs and charts. Web analytic software can
answer important questions such as:
- How many people come to my business website (e.g.
date range, time period)?
- How to they find my business website (e.g. enter URL,
search engine)?
- Which search engines do they use (e.g. MSN Live,
Google, Yahoo)?
- Which keywords are used in search engines to find my
business website?
- Where do my online visitors come from (e.g. country,
region)?
- What are the main entry and exit pages (e.g. home
page, other pages)?
- How do visitor navigate my website (e.g. home page ->
page 1 -> exit)?
- How long do website visitors remain on my site (e.g.
time duration)?
- What portion of visitors return to my site?
- Do visitors submit submit information requests (i.e.
e-forms, e-mails)?
- Do visitors make online purchases? How much do
they spend?
Using this business intelligence (BI), small businesses can make informed
decision to:
- Expand the most popular areas of the site; phase
out other areas
- Identify why web pages are not found/visited (design
or technical issues)
- Identify "key words" that do well in search engines;
refine site text
- Identify customer segments that make purchases
(countries, regions)
- Identify and resolve website navigation issues; make
changes
- Identify and address web hosting issues (e.g.
downtime, slow response)
If your business web hosting package doesn't include adequate web
analytic software,
consider using a third party product such as
Google Analytics.
By simply entering a few lines of code on each web page, your small business
can benefit from a wealth of business
intelligence. Google Analytics, by the way, is available free of
charge.
