KEYWORDS: technology - business - research - online surveys - Australia
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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 Latest Accounting Articles
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 Fx.
*** Romeo Cayabyab is director of Compucentric consulting and lead researcher and writer of techbusiness.com.au
Interesting developments since we wrote the article, What’s wrong with Alexa? SHOWCASEPAGE.net ranking moved up to an Alexa traffic ranking of 2,503,250 from its lowly 12+million ranking about 2 months ago.
How? We are still asking that question ourselves? Prior to this new ranking, commenter dIFLY said to ignore Alexa because it is flawed. Yes, we know it is flawed. Unfortunately, Alexa still remains a site-popularity indicator in the eyes of advertisers. Until such time the industry comes up with an alternative solution, it would be prudent for us to live with Alexa without necessarily relying on it solely to measure site performances and popularity.
The first page of SHOWCASEpage.net, one of the few we monitor, was written last November 11 and as one would expect, the first page was actually only an “About” page.
The only activity the site had so far was to play around with a few WordPress themes using a plugin called “Theme Test Drive” and experimented with WordPress plugins like Snazzy Archives and Syndication for prospective clients.
SHOWCASEpage.net activated the Syndication plugin to grab RSS feeds from other sites (including this site) which was later deactivated and also the resulting articles were “unpublished” from the site.
Today, we noted that this site has an Alexa ranking of 12,126,403 (see screenshot). Yes, only after 2 months and a few pages most of which were RSS feeds. Shouldn’t we be happy that this site achieved that ranking in only a short a time and with hardly any activity?
We don’t think so. We have other experimental sites which have not come close to this ranking. And some of the sites have been online for a while.
So what’s wrong with Alexa? Or, what’s wrong with the other sites we have been monitoring too?
We don’t know yet. We have read somewhere that the Alexa system is flawed. But without having a complete picture of how Alexa does its maths, we cannot comment on those statements.
But the situation we have at the SHOWCASEpage.net website certainly requires a closer look.
Is there really something in this site that is attracting traffic? We don’t know yet. We will install additional metrices in our pages and find out what’s causing this abnormality and see if the Alexa ratingsystem is giving us reliable measurement.
Updated 25 September 2009: SHOWCASEpage.net has an Alexa traffic rank of 1,980, 477 and we have a couple of articles written at our blog at WordPress.com with references to Alexa’s Help pages posted in July 2009 where Alexa acknowledged that Alexa’s traffic rankings beyond 100,000 are not statistically meaningful.
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