Life on Florida’s West Coast

Know Your Website Stats

I talked about several topics involved in getting your online presence up and running when you are a small business owner. I’ve gone over choosing a host, designing a logo, choosing a name for your business and ways to make sure you stay ahead of your competitors in the search engines.

So, how about taking a look at who is visiting your site, how much traffic you are generating and where that traffic is finding you? That is all as simple as making sure you have a good stats program installed on your site and then learning how to make the most of the data it gives you.

GoStats offers both free and paid professional stats for your site. Best of all, they are simple to install and even easier to interpret. I suggest at least signing up for the free stats and seeing how comfortable you are with the data presentation. You can always upgrade to a more advanced account.

The free account does give you access to information about when and where your visitors are coming. I find this to be the most useful part of my stats, because it tells me if advertising is driving traffic, if links from other businesses are successful, or if a particular search engine is returning results for me. It also tells me which days of the week are best for my target demographic and what time throughout the day those people are online and looking for the particular information my website offers.

If you know which pages on your site are most popular, you can gauge where you need to focus future efforts. If I see that a majority of my traffic is coming in to look at a particular product, I will add new products along the same lines.

If you already have stats, learn how to use them. If you don’t have them yet, sign on at GoStats and start learning more about your site’s traffic.

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