Analytics

Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

How Does Web Analytics Help?

Web analytics is a quantitative indicator of behavior of visitors to a website. Simply explained, web analytics involves identification of visitor, analyzing the reason of visit and tracking his/her movement within your website until the time he/she leaves the website.

In essence therefore, web analytics provides a clear picture of the performance of a website so that the website owner can devise strategies to maximize acceptability of the website.

Web analytics mainly comes in two flavors in terms of collection of visitors’ data. The first concerns collecting data from server logfile, and the second by tagging each webpage with javascript. A third web analytics method is a combination of the two whereby more relevant data can be produced than what is possible with either of the two methods.

In this article, we will briefly define some popular web analytics terms, moving on to comparing the two methods before outlining why studying web analytics is beneficial.

Key Web Analytics Terms

‘Hit’ denotes a request for a file from server and is recorded only in logfile. ‘Page View’ means different for the two web analytics methods. While tagging script considers the whole page as one request, the logfile on the other hand will record multiple hits (one for each file, including images, .js and .css) within a single page-view.

A visitor is one who requests for a file to be shown. Once again, while server log will record several files for each visit, the page-tagging script will only consider the page as a whole seen by the visitor. In either case, the web analytics data will clearly identify if the visitor is new (new or unique visitor) or has come before (repeat visitor).

Other Information

Both web analytics methods will be able to gather several other important information, notable among which are as under.

1 The length of time a visitor spends in seeing a website.

2 The keyword phrase used to arrive at the website.

3 The unique IP address and therefore the country from where the visits generated.

4 The arrival and exit pages.

Logfile vs Page Tagging

Data transfer to and from web server is always recorded in server’s logfile with clockwork precision. Since early days, realization dawned that it is possible for a suitable program to extract logfile data and arrange them in a meaningful display. That is how web analytics came into being. Today most servers come equipped with web analytics programs such as Webalizer, Awstats, etc. which analyze raw logfile data and portray valuable visitor information in easy-to-follow graphics.

Between the two web analytics techniques, namely logfile analysis and page tagging, certain differences exist. Here are the main ones.

1 Logfile analysis is usually already available in the server. Page tagging is an outsourced option, which means that visitors’ data is captured by provider’s remote server. You can view them only in provider’s website. Google Analytics and ClickTracks are examples of page-tagging web analytics.

2 Since page tagging requires javascript to be installed on every webpage, there is always a possibility that some visitors’ browsers do not allow the script to run. Not so with logfiles.

3 Logfiles enter transfer of all files, including images and scripts, and therefore certain parameters like hits and page views are not as accurate as with page-tagging web analytics.

4 While logfiles record visits by search engines, page tagging does not.

5 Logfile web analytics record failed visits too. Page tagging takes a request into account only when a webpage is successfully displayed.

Benefits of web analytics

Web analytics is a constantly available feedback from your visitors. Footprints that they leave in the wake of their visits are a great pointer of relative strength and weakness of your website. It is only from web analytics that you get to know which keyword phrases are most relevant to your web content, which pages are visited most, length of visits, incoming links, demographic profile of visitors and so on. If ever you wanted a trusted aide to comment upon your website’s performance, the answer lies in installing a suitable web analytics program.

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An Overview Of Web Analytics

Data analysis is a usual activity, which is conduct by mostly by everyone either directly or indirectly. Companies, shop keepers, wholesalers, vendors etc. does an analysis of their sales figure, profit-loss and other reports with the data available with them. Even, housewife does a virtual analysis of the household stock and there monthly expenditure.

Similarly, web analytics is gaining a momentum among the websites and portals. It is an activity that is being carried out by the corporate those who want to analyze the latest user trends and to be acknowledged with the details of the user who are visiting there online site. In short, Web analytics is defined as measuring of behavior of the user visiting a website

Web analytics helps to conclude the user trend, it can be used to determine from where the maximum number of users are trafficking-in to the site, their preferred sections, color schemes and the geographical distribution of the visitors

The common terms used in web analytics

1) Page View This is the number of pages that has been served by the web server.

2) Hit A request send to the web server by any browser is termed as hit. The number of hits received by a website is used to ascertain its popularity. However, this is often misleading, since a single page may contain many images and other object that contribute to separate hit. For instance, if a page containing 20 images is requested by a user, then the hit counts for this page will be 21 (20 images and 1 page itself).

3) Visit / Session Number of requests from the identified client are known as visit/session.

4) Visitor / Unique Visitor - The uniquely identified client generating requests on the web server (log analysis) or viewing pages (page tagging).

5) Repeated Visitor As the name suggests it is a visitor that has made at least one previous visit.

6) New Visitor - A visitor that has not made any previous visits.

7) Impression This is the count of display of any advertisement on the user screen this screen is commonly used by ad and media agencies while giving advertisement on web.

Any analysis requires data. The data for the web analysis is available in two ways. In short we can say that there are two methods for web analytics

- Log file analysis
- Page tagging

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What is Keyword Targeting?
A lot of people will talk about keyword targeting, but aren’t 100% sure what it’s all about. Some people have a general idea about it, but don’t go about it the right way. You want top listing on the search engines, and you need to target keywords, so you get a #1 listing. If you sell green crystal watches, most people will target “Green crystal watches”, which this is highly targeted, if the search term is only getting 10 searches a month, you might only get 1-2 visitors from it, which means you’re not going to any noticeable about of sales or conversions from it.
The best thing to do, is to get a keyword search tool, there is a nice one called “good keywords” which is free, also you can use google adwords research tool, or msn adcenter research tool, I find these better as they are up to date and are great at making suggestions. What you want to do is try and find a set of keywords that are related to your products, but get a good amount of monthly searches, once you have come up with a list, you want to start targeting the phases you have (a phase is a keyword that is two words or more). It is usually best if you use multiple sources for your keyword research, as you can get a broader picture, which will be more beneficial in the long run, as you’ll then be targeting the general market, and not just the visitors to one search engine. The more targeted your keyword is the better, but also you want the keywords to have a high amount of search made for it every month, striking a balance if often an art in itself, but with a little practice you can get it to a level that you are able to work with (ie amount of work in relation to how many visitors you get from it).
Writing articles is a great way to target keywords you are trying to rank for, writing articles about your keywords, and publishing them on your site, and then building backlinks is one of the most efficient ways to raise your rankings to the first page. Another way is to buy links on websites with a similar content / products and getting them to link directly to your product / content pages for that keywords with the keyword in the link text. Another way to get links with Articles is to publish them to article directories with your keywords in the bio box linking back to your website.

Keyword marketing is more important than most people realize, as if you chose the wrong keywords, and work on building them, they could be dead weight as they get no searches, the opposite is also true, if you choose an extremely highly completive keyword (just say watches) then you’ll need to do an excessive amount of work to get to the front page, which might not be viable for your company in regards to much you’ll need to spend to get the rankings.