Marketing Defined

The effective tracking and analysis of web site statistics, has been a key factor in the healthy increase and consistent growth of targeted website traffic to the Marketing Defined Blog [written primarily for the small biz owner].

How to effectively track and analyze website statistics with professional statistics software comes a very close second to what must be the first and primary goal of any online marketer.  That is to *identify your target market*, find out what their needs are and keep filling those needs with quality blog posts and related products in the sidebar of a blog.

For this, you need to establish these factors:

=>> Where to FIND your market
=>> How to ATTRACT them
=>> How to RELATE to them
=>> How to MOTIVATE them and earn their loyalty
=>> How to DIRECT them to profitability
=>> And thereby RETAIN them as lifelong customers

The key research necessary to establish your target market and their needs is a topic for another day.

If you don’t know your visitors, it makes it almost impossible for you to improve the performance of your Blog and turn more visitors into paying customers.

Here are a just a few of the vital statistics you must know about your blog traffic:

• where people clicked on to visit your site, and the keyphrase used in the SE engines
• what pages they actually access on your site
• how long they spend at your site and from which page they exit

…  regardless of the niche,  if  you do not at least determine which:

• pages that are most effective at turning browsers into buyers, and
• ad click through rates - if you have no physical products

… any attempts at growing improving the profitability of your website is simply going to be impossible, or at the very least; difficult!

Due to budget constraints, new online entrepreneurs dutifully use the standard issue web stats software - offered by many web-hosts. Namely Webalizer, Analog Stats, and Awstats which presents this crucial information in a fairly basic manner, but is nevertheless handy for a start.

SIDE NOTE:  I frequently access my domains’  “Awstats” stats, mainly to halt the flow of unwanted Referrer spam [look for the URLs of spam websites in the Awstats sub heading : "Links from an external page - other web sites except search engines".  To stop them artifically inflating my stats and taking up valuable server resources.   I have blocked many an IP address of major spammers via my .htaccess file and published an article on The correct code to use to block referer Spam.

How to Track n Analyze Blog Web Site Statistics for FREE

To become profitable online, it is necessary to move on to more detailed stats packages, and the choices presented are usually in three main forms of :

• Web Statistics - installed on your domain/server
• Third Party Statistics - log in to access services at a third party website... not my personal preference
• Desktop Statistics - like the excellent ClickTracks - which I use daily to download and analyze my web logs

The crucial breakdown of statistics available by these third party services include:

• Exactly how many people are visiting your website?
• How long they're staying on your site before they move on?
• Exactly where those visitors are coming from, each day, showing the domain and URL?
• How much of your website visitors are "unique" versus "repeat" visitors?
• The most popular web pages accessed on your website?
• The exact paths people take as they click their way through your website, and how long they stay on that particular page
• The keyphrase they used and from which Search Engine they accessed your website

A credible and widely used *free* third-party website statistics package, is *Stat Counter*.

*Stat Counter* is a well-established arm of the reputable German company, Axandra [makers of Arelis and IBP ].

And in case you are wondering how websites like *Stat Counter* offer such a widely used free but quality program? Just like any successful blogger, it’s via advertising revenue on their highly trafficked website

[For example without statistics, I would never have known that some of my biggest Adsense CTR's come from the 468x60 text banners placed directly at the end of each post .  The large Adsense text rectangle at the end of a post does not work. Instead a large rotating Image ad - managed by an Wordpress ad rotator plug-in does]

To use *Stat Counter*, all you do is insert a simple piece of their code usually on the bottom of a web page from which you will be able to analyze and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time.

They also allow email you a weekly analysis/log of each of your website’s detailed statistics, should you so desire.

Update: September 2008
Performancing Metrics: I recently updated a post about Performancing’s excellent blog statistics tracking package that is free for the first 3 domains, providing a total 1000 page views per day. Performancing also gives stats on Adsense clicks. Upgrades starting from a small $2 are available as your blog grows.  Performancing also gives stats on Adsense clicks.