The Importance of Website Monitoring

The success of any internet marketing campaign depends on the ability to monitor and analyse the traffic coming through your website. It is obvious that what cannot be measured cannot be managed.

There are many internet marketing strategies used to boost traffic. Some of these strategies include article marketing, blogging, search engine optimisation and email marketing.

The Internet offers an array of excellent tools for analysing the success of each of these strategies.

Why you need internet marketing website monitoring

Knowledge of visitor behavioural patterns once inside the site is important. If a large volume of visitors to your site get put off at some stage in the buying process, you should know about it. Monitoring can tell you what pages involved in the buying process have the highest exit rate. Analysing and fixing these pages will have a positive effect on your conversions. This is just one example as to why the need to monitor and analyse your traffic. There can be many other reasons justifying the need for detailed performance reports of your site.

What to look for in statistics packages

Visitor statistics are a vital in tracking your internet marketing campaign results. Your web hosting service provider will usually include a stats package with their hosting package. If your web-hosting provider has no statistical package included, you should think of moving to another who does. A counter that only shows the number of site visitors will not be of much help to you. You should have a package that helps provide information that will help you strengthen your site.

A genuine hosting service provider would offer traffic logs giving valuable insight as to, what are the sources of traffic to your website. These can be search engines, directories or other links.

The data given by these hosting service providers come as raw traffic log files or in difficult to understand cryptic formats. The log files basically are text descriptions of actions on the site. With the raw log files it is almost impossible to understand visitor behaviour in your site. If you are short of ‘patience’ going through these logs can be a pain, opting for a traffic-logging package might be a good idea.

Package Options

You can choose to go with either a log analysis package or a remotely hosted traffic logging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service is the cheaper option of the two and is more user friendly. WebTrends Live, HitsLink and SuperStats are good examples of traffic-monitoring services. WebTrends Live however, is a more complex system more suited for larger internet marketing websites. "SuperStats" too provide such services.

These services won’t use your log files. A small code embedded in the page you want tracked, feeds information to the remote server when the page is viewed. This information is available real time, in charts and tables.

Log analysis packages are high-priced and difficult to set up. You can give it a shot with free log analysis packages offered by Analog.

A good traffic logging service would provide data on:

• Number of visitors to your site

• The source of your visitors

• Where do they find your site

• How much traffic is coming from each respective source

• What keyword search phrases are being used to find your site

• What are the most visited pages - what information are the visitors looking for

• How do visitors navigate once inside your web site

Having answers to these and other primary questions will help you make educated decisions that maximize the ROI on your internet marketing website.

What do your stats tell you

It is important to continuously track the results of your internet marketing campaign. This will help you decide which strategies are effective and which are not. Educated decisions will help your business prosper.

What is important is analysing your data. What will be shown in your statistics report are mainly hits, visitors and page views. Hits, though misleading is insignificant. Hits get tracked when any picture or page loads from your server on to a visitor’s browser.

What is perhaps most important is page views per visitor. This shows how many visitors came to your site and their duration of stay. If you have 250 visitors with 300 page views you can figure most visitors viewed at least one page before leaving your site. An acceptable minimal figure can be 2 page views per visitor. If your internet marketing website cannot match this, look for ways of improving visitor retention. Upgrade your content, implement an easier navigational structure. If on the other hand you’re enjoying a high volume of visitors and page views congratulations you are doing just fine!

This statistic acts as a measurement tool of the performance of your website and the effectiveness of your internet marketing campaign.
Another important stat is unique visitors. Any person visiting your site for the second time will not be included in unique visitors. This will show how many new visitors were drawn into your site.

Page views can help interpret the stickiness of your website. Page views divided by number of visitors to your site will help you decide your site content has enough retaining power.

At first glance, web traffic statistics can be confusing because of the sheer volume of data. Do not let this phase you. Remember traffic statistics provide vital information on the performance of your visitors and your Website.