Using Your Web Stats for SEO: Search Marketing Analysis from Web Stats
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Last week, Jennifer covered the basics of web statistics and what they should mean for you. Now that you have a fairly good handle on what all these statistics mean, how do you put them to work for you? These concerns are answered in this article.
Putting it all together
Let’s say you have a recipe site. You have free recipes, but you also have paid recipe subscriptions that your customers can sign up for, or recipe cards and books to order. Your target audience is women, families, moms, dads, grandmas, and newlyweds. Your web stats indicate that you have visitors that come from Recipes.com, and land on a chocolate chip cookie recipe. You determine from your web stats that this page was viewed between the visitor’s local time of 6:15 pm and 6:30 pm . You determine that your visitor viewed the recipe for about 2 minutes, then clicked a few links in your site for a couple of minutes, then browsed your quick meals category for about 5 minutes.
However, you also determine that this visitor left this category after only viewing 2 other recipes without downloading any, having lingered on the second for longer than the first. Your visitor did bookmark your site for later. So what other things can you probably determine about this visitor? Well, your visitor is probably a woman, seeking to make her family dinner, but needs something quickly. She probably has kids home from school, husband home from work soon, and interested in the cookie recipe, but not right now. She’s in a hurry, looking for something particular? Perhaps.
What can you determine about how this user’s visit could have been more effective? You probably need to look at your site navigation. Did she have trouble finding the category she wanted immediately? Were there too many steps to take to get there? And once she was there, did she have a search capability? You know she’s interested in viewing your site more, because your site is bookmarked for later. But why didn’t she download a recipe at that time? You could look at the two pages she checked out. Were they easy to understand? Were there popup ads that drove her away? Maybe she wished to download her recipe without giving her personal information.
Website Marketing 
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