the gold mine of
information it contains.
Your website statistics hold the key
for understanding your traffic, improving sales and
increasing the overall effectiveness of your online selling.
Whether you realize it or not, your website has 'critical
numbers' that enable you to measure the overall success of
your Internet presence.
Any serious website operator should
understand the four most important numbers: Hits; Unique,
Targeted Visitors; Leads; Sales.
Hits - Hits are typically page
views, whether by the same or different visitors, and
indicate overall activity on the site.
A lot of hits shows activity
(usually a good thing), but doesn't necessarily mean you've
had a high number of visitors. Search engine 'spiders' and
surfers hitting their back buttons also up the hit count.
Research has shown that, depending
on the size of your site, the ratio of hits to visitors will
range anywhere from 2 to 1 all the way up to 12 to 1.
Unique, Targeted Visitors - people
surfing to your site who have not been there before within a
certain period of time. Depending on the statistics program
you use, a unique visitor may be someone who hasn't been to
your site in a day or a week, while in other programs a
visitor remains unique until you reset the stats.
You must understand how your stats
program classifies unique visitors so you don't mistakenly
believe your site is getting 30 unique visitors a day only
to find out it is the same 30 people coming back day after
day!
A 'targeted' visitor means that the
visitor has an interest
in
what you are selling or promoting, this is usually
demonstrated by keyword searches at a search engine or by
clicking targeted advertisements.
It does you no good to attract
general traffic to your site -you want unique, targeted
visitors actively seeking your product or service.
Leads - a valid email address
usually makes the best 'lead' since people can and do give
fake names and addresses online. If someone won't give you a
valid email address, chances are they won't give you their
credit card to make a purchase either.
Email leads enable you to measure
interest and to follow up with prospects. Once you know the
number of unique visitors to your site you can calculate the
percentage of leads you develop and concentrate on ways to
improve your conversion by testing different offers and
headlines.
Sales - the number of sales as
compared to unique visitors represents your most critical
statistic because it tells you whether or not you've made a
profit.
For every hundred visitors to your
site, how many sales do