Beyond the numbers

I often hear people tell me how many clicks they get on their websites per month. Sometimes all they care about is having more traffic go to their website. Getting more traffic is good, but is that traffic doing any good? Do you get more sales or value from those visitors?



Any site metric can give you the number of visits you received in a period of time. Some can even give you a nice chart of statistics, telling you the kind of web browsers and operating systems they were using. Unless you are Microsoft, do you really care if 80% of the visitors are using Windows XP and Internet Explore 6 with JavaScript enabled?



You need to know more than these numbers. Do they know why people go to your website and how they use your website? Do you know where they came from and what were they looking for? Do you know why you are not getting any sales from certain products/services on your website?



If you want to learn to improve your customers' experience, pinpoint buyers' exact interests and reach prospects at every phase of the buying cycle, the above questions are very critical to your website's success.



Luckily, this data is often available in your server log. You just need the right web analytic software to mine this information. Not all web analytic/statistic software is created equal. And free software is usually not the way to go for something this important. Also, even with the right data, you still need a search marketing expert to help you understand the data and implement solutions.