It is nearly impossible to do well with your website unless you make use of web analytics. Unless you are not bothered about the progress of your website, you need to learn and implement the web analytics.

What ever your website is all about, and what ever it intends to do, it needs traffic for survival. To improve the traffic flow of your website, you need to know the current traffic flow of your website.

Also, you would want to know about the best pages of your website against the pages that are rarely viewed. All this information would have a lot of significance for you to stay in the market.

So, how do you approach to discover all these details about your website? There must be a means to know which of your pages are doing well, and which are not. One way of doing this is by studying the log file generated by the server.

However, to study so many records, and filter out information out of it can be an impossible or at least very time taking task. In such scenarios wherein the data in the log file is huge, the web analytical tools come in handy.

All the information is sorted for you, and you can view the information you want to. Graphs and bars make the things even simpler to understand the statistics.

As you can see, there are a lot of different tools that you can use web analytics for but again the main importance of learning web analytics is learning about your visitor so you can learn what they are looking for and optimize your website for them.

After you know these things, start to immediately use SEO properly on your website and all of your pages to optimize the keywords that your visitors are searching for.

Take a few pieces of data and work with those for a little while, making adjustments and tweaks here and there until you get it right. Never make huge adjustments daily or you will not know what was successful or what was a failure.

Many corporations, firms and companies employ the usage of web analytics as part of their sales and marketing plans for the greater benefit of their sales profits and revenues. They know that learning how to read the data and implement it means more money for their bottom line.

Once they have the real information and data surrounding the visitors and market audience coming to their website, they can optimize their site and design everything with their customers in mind. This in turn makes conversions a breeze!

Now if only you can learn these same tactics, they you can be just like them and learn the importance of web analytics. After you do, you will see just how crucial they are to getting your business up and running in regards to your website.

Website analytics can break or make your website. Learn all about web analytics and you will be learning all about your visitors and your customers. The more you learn about them, the easier it will be to know how to sell your products and services to them.

After you successfully do this, you can combine your efforts with web analytics and search engine optimization to get the leg up over your competition.

You can also locate the pages that your visitors exit the website at. You must try and figure out the weak points of these pages, and optimize them accordingly.

As can be understood, the web analytics plays a significant role in web marketing and promoting your website.

Source: Graham_McKenzie in

Even to someone like me who enjoys browsing over site statistics and testing the accuracy of the resulting metrics, understanding an Alexa traffic rank is not an easy task.

Except for the fact that the Alexa traffic ranking system is based on information generated from Alexa toolbar users and that “A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Reach and Page Views” plus some kind of “data normalization” which also are not explained, there is not much information about the Alexa ranking system.

In its FAQ, Alexa also stated: “Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the past three months of global traffic according to our diverse data sources, and are updated weekly.”

Alexa traffic ranking

Metrics like unique visits, page views and the like in gauging site traffic performances are still more reliable indicators. They are also easy to understand. I can also explain the figures to my clients.

But I cannot say the same thing with Alexa’s traffic ranking. After all, according to Alexa, if a site traffic ranking is beyond 100,000, the figures are statistically meaningless. For a site traffic rank to be statistically meaningful and reliable, a site should be close to the top rank.

Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. (However, on the flip side of that, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.) // Source: Alexa Help page, “Sites ranked beyond 100,000 – how reliable are the stats?”

With many websites that are not even close to the top 1,000 or even 50,000 (let alone #1), I wonder why advertising placement agencies even bother to look at a website’s Alexa traffic rank!

Note: Article re-posted from .

*** Romeo Cayabyab is director of Compucentric consulting and lead researcher and writer of techbusiness.com.au

I am re-posting an article which I wrote last March at Matter of Sharing and which I would like to revisit within the next few days. Wondering whether there had been articles published recently on the subject, I checked out Google to find out whether I could find some other articles on “website valuation.”

I was very pleased to note that our March article was on top of the list. The screenshot on this page is the Google search results.

Moving on: What I really want to establish is an approach along the lines suggested by other consultants I referred to in my March article. But I need to do some more digging and see if I could find other literature on this topic.

Why can’t we just use an online site valuation calculator? My position is very clear in this regard. I don’t buy figures produced by online site valuers. Because I don’t have information of how those figures (very ridiculous in most cases) were established, how does one expect me or anyone to accept those figures.

Anyway, here is what I wrote last March:

Valuing a website is not an easy task. Even if the same valuation methodology is applied, still the values assigned to websites could vary as no two websites are alike.

Valuing a website is even made more difficult because there is no hard and fast valuation rules. There are no standard valuation methods which can be applied to websites. The traditional valuation methods like value being the equivalent of a multiple x annual sales or multiple x annual profit would not be appropriate methods, especially on cases of popular websites with no established revenue or profit stream but with a growing and loyal membership base.

Given this background, one approach which I find worth exploring is the technique employed by a company in as a principal price determinant. What the company did was to calculate the average monthly unique visits of the web publisher’s sites over a period of three months and apply a certain dollar value to the average monthly unique visitors. It reported:

For the current crop of web 2.0 websites, the kind of multiples being paid to buy companies is around $30-40 per unique visitor. (Note that unique visitors should be counted over a period of one month, usually the most recent). This well known and oft-quoted article from November 2005 establishes an average of $38 per unique visitor based on a range of different website sales.

The trick in valuing your own company is to choose a suitable multiple and here it is best to be conservative. Unless you really are the size of a YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to justify such lofty valuations. Within our diversified web publishing company for instance, we use multiples in the range of $3-8 depending on the site in question.

Digression

Assuming that the only consideration is unique visitors or membership base, does that mean that a website with a reported 175 million users like Facebook would be valued $5.25 – $7 billion?

Recently, Facebook was reported to be valued at $3.5 billion, but using Facebook as an example in this case is not a good example. It was also reported that Facebook had , and that the price may be depressed on account of the current worldwide economic condition.

Valuing a website using unique visitors: a modified approach

Back to the site valuation using unique visitors: One feature which I like in the unique visitors valuation approach is its simplicity and understandability. The issue I have however is that even assuming that the buyer and seller can agree on valuing a website based on unique visitors, still negotiations could bog down from disagreements on (a) the basis of calculating the average unique visitors or membership base. Should this be weekly, monthly or quarterly? On what basis should the average unique visitors count be calculated as such? (b) how much value would be assigned to each unique visitor. How can that value be justified?

Is there another way of valuing a website using its traffic stats like unique visits, yet the stats reflect verifiable effectiveness of site promotions, loyalty of members/visitors, age of the site, costs of replicating the website, and prevailing market charge rates?

We will attempt an alternative valuation approach in our next article.

Meanwhile, how much is your website worth?

Please do check back next week. We will share you our finds. Hopefully, we should be able to develop some kind of guidelines which we can apply. I am certain there are others who are equally interested in this subject.

Note: This article re-posted from .

Google search results for website valuation

*** Romeo Cayabyab is director of Compucentric consulting and lead researcher and writer of techbusiness.com.au