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Using the information $PRODUCT_NAME gives you, you can track and improve the effectiveness of your site, to bring more visitors and more sales (if you're selling).

$PRODUCT_NAME's information helps you answer these important questions:

What is bringing traffic to the site?

Check the Referrers and Search Engines reports, these two reports list which web sites referred your visitors to your site and list the Search Engines which were used to find your site.

Which ads are effective?

A good approach to this is to use special URL's in your Ad Campaigns so that you can understand which ads are bringing traffic. For each ad, use the URL of your home page but add a question mark and some information about the advert. For instance, if you run an on line advertising campaign in Europe on the Search Engine Google, you might use the URL "www.mydomain.com/homepage.html?source=google&ad=euro1". Then in $PRODUCT_NAME, you can look at the Pages (or URL's) view and filter out pages that do not contain "source=google" by using the {=docs_user_chapter_link('user_filter_global')=} and $PRODUCT_NAME will show you all traffic generated by your Google ads. See {=docs_user_chapter_link('user_example_ads')=} for an example.

Which search engines are working?

Check the Search Engines report for how much traffic is generated by each search engine. Those without any entries could be the place to start a new campaign. Do some searches on the Search Engine yourself to see if or where your entry appears. If you are spending more on one search engine but it is producing less traffic, you will need to determine why.

What are people searching for in the search engines-- should you change the text of your pages to get higher placement?

Look at the Search Phrases report, this will tell you what visitors used in the search engine to find you. Compare this to the Words you use in your Web Pages, consider using http "meta" tags on your pages with some keywords - your Web Developer will be able to help you here.

Why are people leaving the site once they get there?

Is there some page which is driving them away? Could you improve it to keep them? Are they leaving as soon as they get to the top page? If so, maybe the site needs to be more attractive or interesting. Are they searching on your site for something, not finding it, and leaving? Maybe you should add that to what you offer. Are they getting to the pricing page and then leaving?

Which demographics buy?

If you're selling something, which domains place orders? Should you be focusing your marketing on that domain? Is the site designed for easy navigation? Are the paths people are taking reasonable? Are they getting lost, or getting in loops? Maybe the site should be streamlined so people can get to the pages they want more easily.

What content works or doesn't?

Are visitors looking a lot at pages you don't spend much time working on, or ignoring the pages you thought were the most important? Maybe you should reconsider your priorities, and work on the content people want.

Do we have enough bandwidth, and a fast enough server? $PRODUCT_NAME can show you the total hits and bandwidth usage of your sites, so you can decide when it's time to upgrade your connection or buy a new server. By upgrading your connection or server before it becomes a problem, you can keep your visitors happy.

$PRODUCT_NAME's information helps you solve important problems. Here are some scenarios where $PRODUCT_NAME can help:

You see in the statistics that a bunch of hits came from Spain yesterday. Want to know what they were looking at? No problem! Just click on the Geographic Locations view and then click on Spain in that table, this 'Zooms' you in on hits from Spain. From {=docs_user_chapter_link('user_report_zoom_to')=} switch to the "Pages" report, and you see all the pages hit by people from Spain, in two clicks.

You're trying to see if a particular page got a hit yesterday. The statistics show the top twenty pages, but you want to see all the pages; the page you're looking for got only one hit, or none, so it'll be way down in the ranking. You can do one of three things:

  • Choose the {=docs_user_chapter_link('user_table_row_numbers')=} feature to 'page' to the last row in the table and 'page' back through the table until you find it.
  • Click on 'All Rows' from the 'number of rows' drop down menu and the table will expand to show all the pages that ever got any hits, even if there are 500,000 of them.

You want to see which paths visitors took through the site, click-by-click. At each page along the way you want to see which visitors left, and where the other ones went next. No problem! $PRODUCT_NAME's "session paths" report lets you see the complete click-by-click details of every visit. Starting with the entry pages, you can click to expand any part of the data, to see whatever you need to see about your visitors and the paths they took.

You want to see a graph of the traffic of hits for last November. No, make that the bandwidth for November. Actually let's see just November 16th. Wow, look at that spike around 3pm; where did all those hits come from? No problem! $PRODUCT_NAME can do all this and much more. This is how you'll think when you use $PRODUCT_NAME. Look at the November hits graph, wonder about the bandwidth; choose "bandwidth bar graph" from the menu and bam! You've got another graph there showing bandwidth where there used to be just a hits graph. See a lot of hits on the 16th? Click the November 16 bar in the graph and the graph changes to show only traffic on November 16, hour-by-hour. Wondering where that spike came from on some particular hour? Three clicks and you can see the traffic for that hour only, broken down by domain, so you can see who it was. Or broken down by page, so you can see what they looked at. Or broken down by referring URL or domain, so you can see which ad, search engine, or web page brought you all that traffic!


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