In the 1800s, John Wanamaker, the famous retail visionary, once said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half." And while that is still true today with many forms of marketing, the Web is not one of them. With the right tools, you can know exactly who is visiting your website and what they are doing while they are there.

Virtually every website is configured to generate information on who has visited the site, how long they stayed, how many pages they visited and where they originated. Armed with this information, today’s marketers can know exactly what is happening on their websites, and are able to respond instantly to changes in their prospects and customers.

Getting your reports
If you host your website with virtually any commercial hosting company, you can access an online report that provides critical information on a monthly or even daily basis. If you host your own website, or if your provider does not provide reports, as long as you can access your Web logs, you can generate your own reports by using free software such as Webalizer (www.webalizer.com).

However you get your reports, a monthly Web report will give you information that makes refining your website and marketing efforts easy. Understanding how to read your reports will make you a Web marketing expert in no time.

Three critical areas
While the typical Web report has pages upon pages of information, there are three sections to focus on first:

Visitors
The first section usually outlines who have visited your page. Generally, your traffic is broken into visitors, unique visitors and hits. Visitors are all those who visited your site; if the same computer visited your site 100 times, you would see 100 visitors. Unique visitors are exactly that. Hits are not really useful since they have more to do with your site’s design than the true number of visitors.

Entry and exit pages
This section of the site tells you where visitors came into your site and where they left. While it is common to have the majority of your visitors enter on the home page, if more than 50% of your visitors exit on the home page, you have a problem. Or maybe they exit on your pricing page. Where they leave from should tell you whether they get lost on your site, don’t know what to do next or simply do not find what they are looking for. Armed with this information, you should be able to tweak your site to alter the statistics.

Search keywords and phrases
Almost 50% of all new traffic to your site comes from search engines. The keyword section of your site tells you exactly what search engines your visitors came from and what terms they used to find you. Don’t see a lot of traffic in this area? Maybe you need to optimize your own site. Visit our website to find tips on optimizing your website to receive more traffic.

Conclusion
Review your site reports monthly, and don’t be afraid to experiment. Unlike most other forms of marketing, websites allow you to make a change every day and instantly see the results. If something works, keep it. If it fails, replace it the next month.

Smart marketing is all about knowing what works and trying new strategies to attain success.

Need help reading or getting a Web report? Contact us for a free analysis of your Web traffic.

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