Web Analytics – Does Your Business Strategy Need Adjusting?

December 19, 2008 by Carl Tambeau
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Marketing Tools

In our last post (December 18, 2008) we discussed the importance of web analytics as it relates to your internet business. How to interpret and analyze key data from your business activities is imperative to your continued success.

Traffic is great But what about knowing about your traffic, other than it is getting better (increasing) or getting worse (decreasing). Executive overviews of traffic stats needs to include comparative analysis which will provide solid insights into how well your strategies are working.

How do you know what to adjust in your strategy?

Your answer could be- adjust what?

You may be happy or excited about the strategy you are using and maybe you are enjoying some results. You believe these results are good enough, why change anything?

Here is a story about our friend Bill to help illustrate our point:

A few years ago a friend of mine, his name was Bill, built a website to sell MP3 players for which the first two months he received very little traffic. (under 5 visitors a day)

After the first few months his website began to average 75 visitors per day and then suddenly spiked to 150 per day and within a few days went down to a daily average of 35 visitor daily.

Being new to the Internet Bill was ok with that number of visitors, as he thought “no problem, at least we have 35 people interested in buying”. Bill figured since he hit 150 per day before, he could easily do it again. The only challenge is he had no idea as to how he had this many visitors in the first place.

Bill shared with me his financial goals and the revenue target he expected to hit every month. His revenue target for the first year needed to be $3000 monthly and the value of each sale would be $100. To break this down further the site would need to bring in 30 sales consistently every month which equates to 1 sale per day. (Seems reasonable ,right?)

With 35 visitors each day and an industry conversion rate of 2% Bill would receive 20 sales monthly at $100 per sale. It certainly doesn’t take a mathmetician to figure out Bill will not make his target. To make matters worse he is reading some of the stats from the website in an effort to understand at least the terminology.

As he is reading he noticed his stats showed a daily average of 10 readers. Bill was shocked and felt like someone punched him in the stomach.

Where did the other 15 visitors go? WHAT WILL HE DO NOW?!

Now Bill was paying attention to his stats and he knew with the current activity, there was no way he would meet his revenue goal with these numbers. His product and service was good but not that good that he could expect a higher than normal conversion rate on traffic.

What would you do if you were in Bill’s position?

Do you believe this can be fixed and/or turned around?

Let’s take a good look at this situation – you would need to find the answers to 6 questions:

What are the number of page views?
How many of the visitors converted to buyers?
Where did the traffic come from – Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask?
Where did the traffic go once it arrived at your site?
What is the average length of visit?
How pages were viewed per visitor?

By going through each step listed above, a lot of answers can be determined about the traffic to a website. With this type of web analytics Bill will be able to determine what is happening when the traffice visits his site.

Are you experiencing the type of challenges which Bill has had to deal with?

Bill told me how he overcame this challenge, never having to misunderstand website data again. To overcome this challenge and know how Bill earned a five figure income per month in his first year Click here.