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What to do with all those numbers? Your web server’s statistics.
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by Roger Plourde.
It’s one thing to have a website; it’s another to know what to do with this website or how to do it.
Your website is a part of your company. It is either an element part of your communications program, your marketing plan or your business processes. No matter the role you give to your website, your possibilities can be endless. Your website is similar to the rest of your activities; you can make decisions regarding its usefulness and its impact by using the reports and its numbers.
Your website’s statistics can help you answer the enigma.
It may not sound very exciting… However, it may be more exciting than you think… In either case, you can’t take it for granted.
The good news is, your website can be accounted for without having to pay an accountant! It’s automatic and free as your server already takes care of it. In fact, everything that happens on your server is registered in its log file.
With the results of your financial statements, you can make all kinds of management decisions about your business. You can do as much with the log information of your website. It can help you make decisions regarding sales, visitors, website navigation, effectiveness of the message, etc. The interpretation of your data will uncover what you need to know.
In order to read the log file, you will need software or an application to make sense of the information. Although analytic software usually displays too much information, by concentrating on only four different factors, it will make your life easier and you will get closer at improving your results.
1. Sales.
Well, this point is easy. So easy you do not need help to determine the results of your sales, however, it is a piece of information that is very useful.
2. Unique visitors
How many visitors came on your website during a set period of time? You must make the difference between the number of visits and the number of people (visitors) that came to your site. Nothing being perfect in this world, none of the data collected from your log file will be 100% accurate. For many different reasons, you must use a 10% plus or minus tolerance level when considering the retrieved data, which can be argued by an IT specialist or a webmaster if they never had to compare this information on two different servers.
3. Conversion rate
The conversion rate consists of calculating how many visitors are actually transformed in clients. In this concept, a client can be replaced by a sale, a subscription, a completed form, or simply a specific visited page.
4. The value of a visitor
What is your visitor really worth? You must consider the cost of acquiring the visitor versus the revenue generated by this one. In order to calculate the value, you must divide your sale price with your conversion rate.
Now what?
For starters, look at the number of visitors. If this number is too low, it is not the site that needs to be modified, but you may simply need to acquire a visibility campaign: search engine marketing, email campaign, and printed documents, link building, PR…
The conversion rate should be situated around 2% and 3%, a benchmark based on the industry norms, however there is nothing scientific about it. To improve this rate, you must focus on targeted online visibility efforts in order to attract specific visitors. Another element to consider is the effectiveness of your landing page, as well as the persuasiveness of the content about your product or service.
You can help by adding a promotional item to your site by offering a discount or a free item, as seen in a store.
By doing this on a regular basis, you will take pleasure in it and your results will increase.
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