Monitoring visitors arriving on your website is one of the most important activities. Based on this data you can promote the website amongst different social media sites, change pages on your website, change your pay per click campaign or perform other actions. You may use the data to create reports which are for others to consume, so you will have to choose the data well. Here we consider some important points:

Page views

The number of page views was considered very important as an index of importance of the site. While this may be true for information based sites it is not so true for e-commerce sites in which ‘conversion’ is the name of the game.

Traffic

The number of visitors to a site is considered as very important by many sites. However, today it is ‘targeted’ traffic that is talked about. Is the traffic coming into the site the sort which you want, in other words any two visitors are not the same.

Data Overload

With the analytic tools available there can be reams of data generated. You have to determine as to which data is the one you want to deal with. The time of day stat which is generated will in general be of very little use. So you have to select the data you want to use.

Fraud clicks

This is the bane of any site when you are using a pay per click program to promote your site. You will have to aggregate the IP addresses of all visitors coming through a PPC route and remove the ad if need be.

Search term popularity

All keywords are not equally important and don’t go by the keywords tool to determine this. You have to check which keywords result in conversion. Then you can rank keywords in terms of popularity.

ATOS

Average time on site is a general statistic. You need to see how much time a visitor spends on a particular page or group of pages. Obviously you should remove all pages on which they spend just 3 seconds, that would contribute to the bounce statistics.

Trends

You sell a cheap holiday for $500, the visitor is not going to spend twenty seconds and buy it. She may want to compare it with other prices and then come back. On the other hand something costing just $5 is likely to result in a quick purchase. In the former case the number of conversions is likely to be low while in the latter it will be high. So absolute figures will not tell the whole story. Look at trends over a period of time that will tell you the story.

Making your report

It is important that you make your report as simple as possible even if you are the consumer of the report. Fancy reports with a lot of colors and 3-D effects may look good but not be well understood. So go now and select the data you want to study.