Website Statistics

Internet Marketing, Tracking Your Results

One of the biggest mistakes that newbies make when taking their first steps into Google AdWords is not tracking the results. But this doesn't only happen with Google AdWords but with all new types of marketing. The majority of people and companies do not track their results or do not track properly.

When people start tracking their marketing it is all too common that the wrong results are being monitored. For example if you start a new marketing campaign and notice that your website traffic increases by 50% this must be a positive result... Not quite. Just because your website gets more visitors doesn't mean that you get more money.

When monitoring your marketing it is vital that you monitor your profit, not your turnover or the number of visitors to your website. The only true representation of how successful your marketing has been is how much profit you have made.

There are many ways you can start tracking your marketing, if your customers phone you up to place an order or enquire about your products. You can simply ask them, how did you find us? Which search engine did you use? What search term did you use?

Using this method you can generate good results although you allways get some customers who was handed your info by someone else and some people just don't seem to remember how they found you.

If you are selling your products online using a e-commerce shopping cart or even a service like PayPal you can track every step a visitor makes all the way through to purchase. Google has their own monitoring tool called Google Analytics. This tool allows you to monitor every visitor into your website, you can see what traffic sources provide your visitors, how many pages they visit, which page do the leave on.

Google Analytics has a powerful tool called Conversions, you can define what you class as a conversion for example this maybe the thank you page after someone has purchased one of your products, it may be the thank you page after someone has joined your mailing list or subscribed to your newsletter.

You can then take this a step further and create a sequence of conversions, this is often called a sales funnel. You may for example set up a conversion for when someone enters their name and email into your squeeze page. A second conversion may then exist on the page containing how to buy your product and finally and conversion at the end of a shopping cart.

Using this method you can see how many people get to your squeeze page, who then goes on to find out more and finally the percentage of visitors who go on to purchase one of your products.

When you are successfully tracking your marketing campaigns you will always know which keywords from which traffic sources are generating you the most profit. You can identify what does not work, ignore it and then concentrate on your marketing that gives you the best results.

I wish you all the best.

About the Author: Mark Voce - I hope you found this article helpful. Check out my blog to get more advice, tips, secrets and the latest news on Google AdWords and Internet Marketing.

Source: Entireweb Newsletter * September 11, 2008 * Issue #474

Eye Tracking, Statistical Analysis and Site Success

How a subject views a book page, a store display, an advertisement or other visual stimuli is measured using sophisticated tools that track eye scan, also called eye movement. These tools measure which design elements capture visitors' attention and which don't.

Eye tracking is used in virtually every kind of marketing - TV ads, billboards, product packaging and web sites - to determine what works and what doesn't with consumers.

What Does a Visitor See on Your Site?

The layout of a site page is scanned differently by each visitor based on individual perception, interest, need, age, education level, computer monitor, browser settings and other variables that can be tracked in empirical, eye tracking studies.

The results of numerous eye tracking studies have been quantified, enabling web site designers and owners to optimize site pages for maximum impact and "stickiness."

Single- and Multi-Variant Testing

Single-variant testing involves changing one site element and measuring the impact on conversion rate, for instance. Multi-variant testing employs a series of simple A/B comparisons conducted simultaneously or sequentially depending on what's being tested.

Using statistical analysis, and eye tracking data across broad-spectrum demographics provides numerical sums based on number of observations and length of observations of different elements on any site page. That's something you want to know. What captures the attention of site visitors? What is ignored?

Single-variant testing is the simplest to initiate and track. However it's time-consuming and may lead to unsubstantiated conclusions. Multi-variant testing is a more efficient means of determining which site appearances and features deliver optimum results, i.e. the highest conversion rate.

However, multi-variant testing is more complex than changing a single variable and waiting to gather the A/B test results. It could take months to optimize a site for conversion. Further, single-variant testing often requires the tester to make certain assumptions that may or may not be true.

For example, a change in type font shows a boost in conversion ratio. Is it logical to assume the change in font style is responsible for the improvement? No. In fact, this fallacy is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc" in the world of statistical analysis. Roughly translated, it means "after this therefore because of this."

Simply because something occurs (an improvement in conversion rate, for example) after a single-variable change has been made (the change in font) does not mean that the improvement in conversion rate is due to the font change. The improvement could be based on another factor entirely.

Planning Your Test Model

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."

If you blindly (or wildly) change design elements without a thought to site improvements, all you've done is collect a lot of data. In order to determine which changes to a site improve conversion rates, it's important to first define what you're looking for - your test metric. What site element or elements will be compared?

Next, in order to develop useful data, you must determine how you'll measure and compare functionality. What methodology or "conventions" will you employ to determine a reliable outcome?

And finally, you must be able to develop a strategy that optimizes site success, however that success is defined by you. Here's an example.

Let's say you want to determine which checkout software is better for your bottom line. Before you can conduct your test, you must first create a test metric - a measurement that defines the term "better" in your query: which checkout software is better?

You might determine the test metric to simply be the number of visitors who convert. That's easy to measure, but it may not provide the complete picture. Perhaps a more useful measurement of which checkout software is better is the dollar amount each visitor spends. Or the number of repeat buyers you see. An íncrease in the number of page views, number of unique visitors or a jump in bandwidth, indicating an íncrease in downloads from your site - all of these are reasonable test metrics depending on your mission. This leads to the next step in developing accurate statistical analyses: how will comparisons between the A/B elements be measured or quantified. What test "conventions" or methods will be employed? Will you count all site visitors in the study - even those that bounce - or will you limit the test pool to those who actually put something in their cart? Or actually reach the checkout but abandon the shopping cart? Or actually complete a transaction? Determining the methodology of your single-variant or multi-variant testing prevents jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions.

And finally, what steps can be taken based on the test results you develop? If you can't answer this last question, why are you going to all the trouble to conduct the test and collate the data? If you get result Y, what can you do with that information versus result Z? This is where statistical analysis is turned into a practical, organized strategy for improving conversion ratios.

Once the test metric(s) and conventions are established, you run an A/B comparison test using the two different checkout models.

Checkout A requires two clicks to complete a transaction. Checkout B requires six clicks to complete the same transaction. Your test results reveal that the more complicated checkout model leads to a higher percentage of shopping cart abandonments. So can you assume that checkout Software A is better than Software B?

If your test metric was a simple count of software usability, Software A is the clear winner. But what if your test metric was to determine which checkout software led to the highest "per visitor" purchase amounts? And test results reveal that checkout Software B delivers fewer purchases but purchases of higher value. In this case, Software B would be the better choice. That's why it's essential to determine each test's metrics and conventions.

Measurement Tools

There are a lot of software packages to help in gathering test data. One, called Crazy Egg provides different GUIs of site activity - an overlay view, a list summary and even a heat map showing what's hot and what's not on your site. Easy and effective analysis.

Another popular conversion rate analysis software is Click Density, which provides real-time visitor data to help improve everything from content architecture to link placements.

Click Tale tracks every movement of visitors as they move through your site. This data is then translated into animated graphics to help you understand visitor behaviors from the time they arrive until they leave.

Finally, consider using Google Analytics - the simplest statistical analysis tool available. And it's free. Google Analytics provides snapshot views of your site's activity, allowing you to perform tests and analyze data in seconds instead of spending hours poring through report after report.

The point is this: to improve site conversion rates requires an understanding of eye tracking and statistical analysis to produce a useful optimization strategy. The hit-or-miss approach is simply too time consuming. So, if statistical analysis makes you light-headed, hire a professional who can design and validate test metrics and translate those findings into actionable strategies.

That's how you improve site performance systemically and efficiently.

About The Author: Joel Tanner is a seasoned internet marketing consultant who has been educating web designers on the best techniques in search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization for nearly a decade.

Source: SiteProNews * September 17, 2007 * Issue #995

Correctly Interpreting Your Website Traffic Statistics

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an immeasurably important tool for a number of reasons. But before you can manufacturer full use of this tool, you must understand how to interpret the data.

Top web hosting companies will provide you with fundamental web traffic data that you then have to interpret and make appropriate use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be imposing if you don't grasp how to supplicate it to your particular undertaking and website. Let's start by examining the most fundamental data - the general visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These statistics are the most genuine allowance of your website's performance. It would appear on the surface that the more visitors you see documented, the better you can figure your website is performing, but this is an inaccurate understanding. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they get to your website to accurately assess the effectiveness of your site.

There is usually a great delusion about what is ordinarily known as "hits" and what is really competent, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply mean the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the actuality that a hit can readily equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an impression of how exaggerated the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in truth we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your location. As you can see, hits are not worthwhile in analyzing your website traffic. The more visitors that turn up to your website, the more genuine your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your evaluation will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The lesser the number of visitors, the more a few unorthodox visitors can misrepresent the assessment.

The aim is to use the web traffic information to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to ascertain this is to discover how long, on average, your visitors run through your site. If the time spent is comparatively brief, it usually indicates an elementary problem. Then the challenge is to evaluate what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are guiding the wrong variety of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are disorganized or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit quickly. Use the experience of how much time visitors are spending on your site to identify specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as an estimate of how effective your fix has been.

Furthermore, web traffic stats can help you establish effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you consider as important, but visitors are exiting it swiftly, that page needs work. You could, for example, evaluate improving the link to this page by making the link more substantial and attractive, or you could reform the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you maintain are less essential, you might want to move some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that specific page. As you can see, these statistics will broadcast vital knowledge about the profitability of distinct pages, and visitor habits and stimulus. This is essential information to any effectual Internet marketing campaign.

Your website unequivocally has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to leave quickly. Nonetheless, not every visitor to your site is going to locate exactly what he or she is looking for, so observations may show you a number of other exit pages. This is customary unless you notice an exit trend on a specific page that is not designed as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not intended for that purpose, you must closely contemplate that particular page to figure out what the difficulty is. Once you identify potential weaknesses on that page, tiny modifications in content or graphics may have a consequential impact on the visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Take notice if selective keywords are directing a specific variety of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor - implicating that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase - the more profitable that keyword is.

However, if you find a great number of visitors are being directed - or should I say, misdirected - to your site by a specific keyword or phrase, that keyword demands modification. Keywords are essential to bringing quality visitors to your site who are open to do business with you. Close evaluation of the keywords your visitors are using to locate your site will give you a fundamental understanding of your visitor's needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are discovering your website by typing in your company name, break out the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant focus of brand recognition, and this is certainly an indication of burgeoning success.

About the Author: Mike Tansey has been online since early 2004. He can set you up with your own profit-unlimited pulling website within the next 24 hours. Duplication is the crux to Network Marketing, Mike has the Answer. Affiliate Marketing Opportunity.

Source: Entireweb Newsletter * May 18, 2006 * Issue #232

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