Web Analysis

Well, you've got your site set up, your search engine positioning is complete and you're waiting for the money to come pouring in the door. You sit back with a cup of coffee and wait. It's two weeks later and you're on your 40th cup of coffee and still nothing.

What happened? Here's one of the most crucial steps in your online marketing process. Finding out what happened. What you need to do is look at what pages your visitors looked at, how long they spent looking at it, and where they went next, and what page they left from.

Avenues for Analysis

There are two different approaches to digging out this information. The first is using a reporting program that uses the server logs to extract the required information. 

Three programs I'm familiar with that do this are Web Trends which sells for $500, Sawmill which sells for $99 (single user) and analogx which is free. They all do similar basic reporting.

Web Trends and Sawmill have more information about how the visitors went through the site and how long they spent on each page. I haven't found that to be the case with analogx. It has a lot of good info, but it doesn't really compare to Web Trends or Sawmill. 

Sawmill, which I've been using for the last three months does an excellent job. As a matter of fact, I think they're better than Web Trends in terms of visitor tracking through the site. It's pretty awesome.

Another approach is to put a small piece of code in each of your web pages. This allows you site to be monitored by another site. The monitoring site keeps track of the all the information noted above. You can log into the monitoring site and see where you are at any time. One of the services is Web Trends Live. It starts at $35 a month. We have a service available that starts at $12.97 a month. You may be curious why theirs is $35 a month and ours is $12.97 a month. Web Trends is oriented to the corporate enterprise market. To a large corporation $35 is nothing. To small to medium company $35 a month is $420 a year. There are others out there that are less expensive.

Two extremely valuable pieces of information are also available through analysis. Where did the visitor come from and what search words did the visitor use? This is your feedback to your search engine positioning. With this information you can adjust your keywords and polish your positioning efforts to get improve your search engine results.

Sawmill is available from Sawmill, or purchase it from me and I make a couple of dollars on the deal. Click here to order.