Website
Statistics

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Website Promotion Basics 1
Aims and Statistics

30th May 2007

If you are planning your first website or already have one or more websites which you wish to promote to a larger audience you might want to begin by considering just what it is you are trying to achieve and how you aim to measure your progress.

• Document Your Aims. Precisely what are you aiming to achieve with your website? Exactly what it is you want to tell or show your audience through its pages? How many visitors are you expecting or hoping to get? Is there some action you want your visitors to take as a result of their visit? If you have not already done so you might want to write out the purpose of your website right now. Just to make certain that you have this absolutely clear.
  
  Once you have your purpose committed to text and you are completely happy with it you should review each individual webpage, actual or planned, that goes to make up your (existing or planned) website. Ask yourself how each page contributes to your purposes. The more specific and definite the purpose of the page in question the easier that page will be to promote if required.
  
  

Having clarified your aims you need some way of measuring your progress in achieving them. How many visitors is your wensite getting? Are they landing on the right page? Are they seeing the pages you want them to see? If you want them to take some action, to place an order or complete a form perhaps, are they reaching the necessary page? What proportion of those who reach the target page are actually taking the action that you want them to take?

• Statistics. Having access to the right statistical information about how your website is performing is crucial. This is really stating the obvious but without some means of measuring your performance you have no clear way of measuring the effectiveness of your performance strategy. The basis of any measurement of performance is statistical data on access to your webpages. It is possible to acquire a wealth of detailed information about access to your webpages. As a beginner you will at least want to know how many times a particular webpage has been accessed in a particular period - 'page views'. You might also want to know how many individual visitor sessions have been run on your website - 'visits'.
  
  
• Web Counters. The most basic way of measuring page views is simply to include a web counter or hit counter on your webpage. If all you need to do is to measure the number of times your webpage is accessed then you need look no further. You can get free and paid web counters and all you need to do to use many of them is to paste a little bit of code into your webpage. Some web counter providers include advertising or a link to the provider's website as part of the deal. These are best avoided. If you use a counter you might prefer one that appears discrete and unobtrusive or better still one that is invisible to your visitors.
  
  
• Page Tagging. Things can become more sophisticated with page tagging. Page tags can link to services which which will provide more comprehensive sets of detailed information on website access. Such statistical data can be provided free of charge or you can pay for the privilege. Payment can allow access to more detail or to a greater volume of information. With page tagging an invisible tag is placed on a webpage and used to collect information about access to that page. 'Cookies' (small files) can also be placed on the visitor's computer to facilitate the collection of information about each visitor. Page tagging is available from third party providers on a free or paid basis. It provides a good option if you do not have ready access to useful logfile statistics but they do require that you amend the webpages in question.
  
  
• Logfile Statistics. The service hosting your website will usually produce logfiles. The logfiles can be analysed by software to produce statistics on access to your website. Like those produced by page tagging, these can either be very simple or very sophisticated or something in between. Check with the organisation hosting your website to see what statistics are available. Usually you will have been made aware of the location of these and how to access them when first setting up your website. If you have yet to choose a hosting service then access to site statistics is a factor to bear in mind when making your choice.
  
  

Once you have mastered the basics you might want to go further. Great sophistication and complexity is possible. But how much detail do you really need? Decide what it is you need to measure then find the means to do it.

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© Trevor Womack 2007