Website
statistics
How
to make the most of your visitor statistics, and why they
are important.
I
think its worth mentioning website statistics on a seperate
page, poeple often rush selecting a host for their new affiliate
website without looking at what they are really getting and
often choose the cheapest option with no regard for what (if
any) statistics they get.
So
why do we need statistics, and what kind of statistics can
we get?
Im
my opinion one of the most important tools for generating
money from a website is the statistics, I want to be able
to see how many people visit per day, what pages they visit,
when it was last visited by googlebot and other bots, how
long visitors stay on my website and how they navigate around,
who links to my website and probably most important - what
they typed in the search engine to get there.
The
reason this is so important is because not only can you see
if your keyword phrases you have targeted are working, but
that often you will find poeple have came to your website
with keyword phrases that you werent aware of, and then you
can literally create a page of your website based around this
keyword phrase, this can be a great source of traffic as you
already know people are finding you this way without optimising,
so you know that by optimising a page for that keyword you
can almost garauntee more traffic. Simple.
Also
you may find that some pages are getting lots of hits and
traffic, and you know that you want to target those particular
pages with 'monetising' ideas - affiliate banners, products,
etc.
Its
worth noting that a lot of webhosts charge extra for statistics,
sometimes £5 a month or even more. Always make sure
you figure this extra cost in when choosing a host, that other
host that was more expensive that gave you great stats may
now not seem so expensive!
Personally
my hosting all use AWSTATS which has everything I need including
all the statistics mentioned above. (if anyone is struggling
for a decent host WITH stats, please drop me an email as I
can make recomendations or provide hosting at reasonable cost),
HOWEVER, it isn't my attention to advertise my own services,
I do well enough without needing to do that, but if your interested
give me a shout.
Another
handy thing with your affiliate website statistics is being
able to see what country your visitors come from. For example
you may be getting 30% of your website traffic from the US
or some other country without offering any products/services
for those potential customers. (assuming your website UK based)
It wouldn't take much to find an american or foreign affiliate
merchant to be able to also target those visitors. In
effect improving your profit by 30% with little effort.
All
these little things are worth looking into, and you really
would be missing out if you couldn't view these kind of website
statistics.
Web
based statistics where another company keeps statistics for
you aren't generally as good as your own hosting statistics,
they nearly all require you to add code to your webpages (usually
with links to there website) often don't offer reliable statistics,
can cause your page loading to slow down as they gather information
and rarely offer any decent statistics of what keywords and
keyphrases were used to find your webpages.
So,
in summary get hosting with decent statistics, and use them
to your advantage!!
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