[ayolov]

Hello everyone!

I didn't find any threads that focus on measuring visitor statistics so I decided to open up one to talk about this very important topic.

Once you start getting traffic to your site, it is very important to look at your visitor stats, here you can find out what countries and states they are coming from, how much time did they spend on each page, what did they do on your site, etc.

Reading stats is like playing a detective game, you follow clues that will lead you to a conclusion. Let's say you read on your stats a visitor traveled 6 pages and finally ended on your sales pages, you follow the trends and discover that a number of visitors are following similar paths; you could improve your conversions greatly by linking the first pages they are arriving from directly to your salespage.

Another example might be that you see many visitors leaving your salespages before 30 seconds go by, this most certainly means a weak title, tweak it and analyze the difference in time after a week; this is the way you receive feedback from your visitors without even asking for it!

Then of course it's a treasure for keywords, if you know what keywords are working for you then you can simply strengthen the ones that convert better. You can make a list of all the keyword and determine what information your visitors truly want from your site.

What other information have you been able to extract from your stats?

How much do you rely on your stats?

What stats software have you used?

Mario.

[mrbreeze]

Keeping a good eye on stats is crucial, especially for finding out which keyword phrases actually convert!

[Matt Helphrey]

Hi Mario,

You brought up a very good way to increase your conversions. Analyzing stats is a great way to do that. I would add though that traffic has got to be the number one priority because you have to have a good amount of traffic to really take anything from your stats.

Great advice though and thanks for sharing!

Matt

[Graham Maddison]

Good topic Mario,

I personally use statcounter which is a free program StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats

Using this program it is very easy to see where visitors come from, the pages they enter my site on and the pages they exit as well as any exit links they use.

There are many useful features this free program offers and anyone who has a new pips site would do well to start using statcounter to get a more accurate view than that with the default stats.

graham

[Suzanne Morrison]

HI Mario,

Great tip... I use Statcounter as well and find it excellent. The most useful stat to me is the recent keywords and keyword analysis which helps me to tweak my SEO.

Cheers,
Suzanne

[Alan Mc Donald]

is stacounter still only free for upto 500 visitors guys?

[bobquest]

Yes, if you want more than 500 you'll have to pay. How much depends on how large you want your visitor quota to be.

Bob

[hookman]

Hi Graham,
Thanks for the tip. I have now registered with Statcounter and have setup counters on all my sites except my pips affiliate site which for some reason will not work through my Webepanel.
Is anyone else having the same problem?

[Graham Maddison]

To add statcounter to your pips site, you will need to add it to the source code of the pages you want to monitor.

The best way of doing this is by first of all making a backup of the page . ie index.html and calling it indexbak.html or something like that.

Then copy the source code into nvu and add the statcounter code.

copy the code from nvu and go to your webepanel and create a new file ..i usually call it something like test.html

On the blank page, paste the code you copied from nvu and save ......this should save a new page called test.html

click on the the new page to view it........if you are happy with it, you then now need to rename it .....in this case index.html ......to do this, click on the symbols abI on the test.html page and a box will open asking what you what you want to rename it to....type in index.html and it will overwrite your existing index.html.

If you do happen to screw up, as long as you have made a backup you can rename that index.html.

Ihope this helps.

By the way, there are video tutorials in the pips bonus section .http://www.newbietrainingvideos.com/videos

Good luck.

Graham

Originally Posted by hookman

Hi Graham,
Thanks for the tip. I have now registered with Statcounter and have setup counters on all my sites except my pips affiliate site which for some reason will not work through my Webepanel.
Is anyone else having the same problem?

[ayolov]

I agree statcounter is geat! I use it in small sites (with 10 pages at the most). One of the problems when reading stats is you get overwhelmed with information, looking at raw stats from your server might make you faint.

The free version of statcounter has a limit of 500 visitors if I recall correctly; this is very good because when I started out reading stats I gathered two or three months of information which is too wide a time frame to read correctly, now I make one week readings and the information is much more accurate and useful so statcounter actualy heps you read your site's information correctly.

Clicktracks was also very good but it was sold and don't know how well is their service any more. Also, google analytics is very good and they say yahoo's analytics is even better but have not been able to test it either.

Knowing what to look for is very important. Another great tip is to look at the time and date logs, with these you can determine what time and date your market is most active (in some it's in the weekend others on Thursday it all depends). Your next Special Offer tweeat and email about it exactly on the date and time your users are more active for a noticeable spike in response!

[ayolov]

Additional Tips,
Know first hand what do you want to know from the stats at your site, is it how many visitors? is it how many clicked a certain link during a campaign? what action did the person perform?

Usually, keywords will determine a lot of the behaviour of your stats, be it conversions or results. Let's say you have a page where you sell designer bags, and you see from your stats that many visitors are coming to your page looking for "lookalike- designer bags", here you have two options, one, to create a page that sell these imitations ;-) or/and you can reword your page and weed out those visitors and concentrate on getting more qualified visitors that will actually purchase your $900 bag.

Look only one page at a time work on it untill it is a success, don't get lost on all the information, look only at the information that will help you on your goal and you'll have a mean, lean, high converting website in a wiff!

[markshields]

Hi Everyone

This is my first post in this topic however it has caught my eye and before now I used to have my own dedicated server which had full stat tracking and very good I must admit however my need for this server has gone so I have gone to a different form of hosting and been using google analytics and just wondering how this compares to others?

[gostats]

You may want also to take a look at Gostats Free Analytics & Website Hit Counter.
It's available from http://gostats.com