Learn Web Analytics in 7 steps (Part 4)

Who are your visitors?

Dear web analytics learner, welcome back to the blog. In our last issue we rounded up the 3-step sequel of web analytics for beginners and now we are going to take a closer look at your business and your website’s visitors, and find out how Web Analytics can help you increase your ROI.

In Web Analytics, there are different ways in which you could define your visitors. In my last post I mentioned the segments you can make, which allows you to break down the incoming traffic to your site into manageable groups (segments) by geographic location or referrer.

Just to show you how easy it is to create a segment in Logaholic, I’ve created a little video for you here:

It’s useful to have segments for things like:

• New Visitors
• Customers
• Traffic from important or paid links
• Traffic from important geographic markets

After creating segments for groups of visitors, you’ll have much more insight into your visitors because segmented statistics are much more valuable than a site wide average. Remember the popular adage says: “The average human has one breast and one testicle”… So be careful not to make too many assumption based only on site wide averages.

Segmentation and ROI

Knowing who your visitors are comes down to figuring out what they are looking for when coming to your website. For example, creating a segment for visitors from www.shareware.com from USA, and naming it: USA Shareware.com traffic, will help you to find out if advertising on shareware.com pays off. The Overall performance report from the Conversion rates tab is a starting point for measuring your ROI of different segments. In this report, after you have created the above mentioned segment of visitors, you will see exactly how many of them converted and what the overall conversion rate is.

The Sales Funnel
Another great way to evaluate your ROI is by creating a sales funnel report. When setting up the sales funnel, you can insert the cost for a single click of incoming traffic (for example, from shareware.com) to your site and at the bottom, the revenue from a sale. When the sales funnel is generated, it will display the total number of visitors to your site from shareware.com and how much traffic trickles down through the different stages you have defined, what the conversion rate and bounce rate is from stage to stage and finally what the ROI of the funnel is, based on the cost per click and the revenue generated by the target page in last funnel stage.

How to increase ROI

Using the example above, let’s say the reports show that my traffic from shareware.com isn’t converting very well. This tells me that the money I spent on advertising on this site didn’t yield enough sales to justify the cost. A few of them downloaded a trial version of my software, but nobody bought it. Now, it could be that my software sucks, but it could also be that people coming from this site only look for free software. Now that I know it, at least I can slash my advertising on shareware.com and stop wasting money.

Another example: If I make a sales funnel for my Italian visitors from Google, lets say I find out that 5 % of them convert. Compared to a 2% conversation rate of my USA Google visitors. The sales funnel just helped me discover that if I can increase my visitors from Italy or if I create a landing page in Italian for them, I can probably get even more orders from them.

This is one of the many measures you can take to increase efficiency and ROI on any of your online campaign.

Logaholic 2.5 updated

We’ve just updated to Logaholic version 2.5.2. This fixes a number of bugs in our 2.5 release, mainly the bug in return visitor calculation, the SPE login problems and some more details. All download links on the site have been updated.

What’s new in Logaholic 2.5

We’ve just updated the files on our site to our latest official release, Logaholic Web Analytics 2.5.

Many little improvements and enhancements make this release even easier to use.

One major change is that the software is now multi-lingual, so you may choose which language you want to see Logaholic in. (Well, just English and Dutch for now, but if you want to help us translate Logaholic into your language, please read this.)

Enhancements to the user interface include:

• Improved menu navigation
  Easier, faster access and more consistency throughout the application. The ‘action menu’ is now available on many more items, so you can jump and drill through your stats like never before.
• Sorting galore
  All report tables now have sortable columns. (We love you jQuery)
• Dynamic helper menus
  While completing forms, you now get a helper menu showing possible input based on your stats, whether it be keywords, pages, referrers or almost anything else.
• Introducing Workspace
  A great improvement that will keep track of the reports you visit and put them all together on one dashboard screen so you can easily compare and analyze multiple reports with multiple settings and segmentation at the same time.
  Trust me, it rocks

This release is mainly the result of feedback we received over the last few months. Thanks to all the customers who participated in our feedback survey, I hope we have a few new features that you will ‘enjoy’.

Phones, Feeds, Segments and more:

• Mobile Browser Report
  iPhone vs Blackberry. Find out which mobile devices are visiting your site and which ones matter. We’ve also updated overall browser detection.
• Feeds and Feedburner
  RSS/XML Feed urls are now reported separately from pages, and not counted as ‘human’ visitors towards your website visitor stats. Plus, if you use Feedburner, you can also get your Feedburner stats in Logaholic.
• New Graphs and Trends
  More graphs have been added to the Today dashboard, which now has a little widget that enables you to switch quickly between essential graphs. Also, check out the Search Trends report to see the big search engines battle it out.
• Full time zone support
  We’ve extended timezone support in this version. You can now set the reporting and collecting timezones separately for any profile.
• Improved Visitor Segmentation features
  The segmentation system has been significantly improved. It now has full support for negative conditions and is much faster. We hope more people will now be able to discover this powerful feature. (Current users: Segmentation was called ‘Filters’ in previous versions, silly us)
• Default Visitor Segments
  We’ve added some default Segmentation filters to get you started, like: New visitors, Return Visitors and Mobile Visitors. But also examples for creating visitor segments for things like Google Adwords, so you can easily track your marketing campaigns performance.
• Updated Test Center
  The PHP Split Test result report has been enhanced with cool new metrics like the time spent on each page variation and their bounce rates.

For those SPE users out there that are blessed with Terrabyte logs files, tons of profiles and Gigabyte databases; we’re working on an (even) faster database, but that is still in the pipeline. We have added some more maintenance features in the meantime though:

• added command line script to update all profiles in the background
• added command line script to keep database size under a certain threshold of months
• added (beta) support for mysql pack and merge tables (doesn’t work on all tables yet)
• added a new user level that cannot edit the profile at all.
• added 1st party visitor cookie support in SPE style javascript tracking code

You can download Logaholic Web Analytics 2.5 here:

http://www.logaholic.com/wp/trial-download/

Thanks for your help!
Michael

Logaholic 2.5 Released

We’ve just released Logaholic Web Analytics version 2.5. All download files have been updated on the site. We’re also making good progress on the manual …

Time is up for today but stay tuned; tomorrow I’ll fill you in on everything that’s new in this version.

Don’t forget to read the Upgrade Instructions if you are upgrading from a previous version of Logaholic.

Learn Web Analytics in 7 steps (Part 3)

“Where are my visitors coming from?”

Dear Web Analytics starter, welcome back to my blog. This week we are going to answer the second most important question of any Web Analytics user: “Where are my visitors coming from?”

Assuming you have read my previous post and know what types of visitors are reported in your Web Analytics software (I am using Logaholic Self Hosted Edition 2.4.3 as an example), I will continue with introducing you to the sources of your traffic.

If you are actively advertising your site or optimizing it for organic search, you would expect to get visitors from:

• Referrers (other websites where you are linked or where you advertise)
• Search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc)
• Directly from users who type in your URL in their browser or if they have bookmarked it

These traffic sources will be listed in more detail in the Top Referrers and Search engines reports in your Incoming Traffic tab (in Logaholic). A typical Top Referrers report will show you all traffic sources in one list, so if you want to look only at the performance of search engines, you would need to generate the Search Engines report. The Top Referrers report will only show you the sum of visitors and page views for each item. More detailed info is hidden in the URL of the referrer, so when you click on it, you can drill down deeper with tools like Click Trails, Trends and filters.

According to my Top Referrers report I get most of my site’s traffic from Google. In the report I can see the number of visitors each referring web page has generated for me. If I want to know where my visitors are from geographically, I can access the Top Countries and Cities reports. If I want to get more personal with my visitors and check pout activity on an individual basis, I can go to the Most active users report, where I will see the IP’s and corresponding country and city of each of my most active visitors. Clicking the IP number will also allow me to access the Click Trail for that user, so I can see the visitors’ complete history on my site.

One thing to note about referrer reports is that they provide little insight into direct traffic (bookmarked pages and people who type in your url). You can recognise them in the referrers list because instead of a URL of the referrer, there is a dash sign displayed. This is because your Web Analytics software cannot identify a URL as a source (for instance, the user may have received a direct link to your site in an email, or he might have typed it in, or bookmarked it in his browser).

Down to the bottom line

As you see, your Web Analytics program will generate various reports to show you where your traffic comes from in as much detail as you like. However, at the end of the day it all comes down to these ‘bottom-line’ type of questions: (eg) Are your Italian visitors buying more than the German ones and is your Google paid search yielding more visitors to your site who make a purchase (or become contributors, subscribers, etc).

Sometimes, the default reports might not give you the exact answer you are looking for. This is where Segmentation comes in. In Web Analytics, segments are groups of visitors defined by certain characteristics (parameters). In Logaholic this is called a Segmentation filter. For example you could make a filter that creates a group of visitors that match the following criteria: visitors from Germany that come from Google typing the keyword: “solar power”. You might then name this segment ‘German solar power visitors’ (you can use any name you want). Next you could create a another segmentation filter, with the same settings but now from Italy. A Segmentation filter can be applied to most reports in Logaholic which means you now have the ability to easily compare visitor segments to each other.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

But why would you need to know so much about your incoming traffic? The answer is in the Conversion reports. As you are spending money on Google Ads, or time optimizing your site for a better search engine position, you want to know if your efforts generate any profit. The Referrer and Keyword conversion reports will show you the truth about your business at one glance: you will see which referrer has generated visitors and how many of them have converted.

In order to see which referrers bring you visitors who convert and from which countries come most of the converted visitors, you would need to create those segments I mentioned above. In the course of time, you will be able to track the performance of certain referrers and at some point you will see that some of them generate more valuable traffic than others. Hence, you will stop advertising there on the less performing sites. Or you might discover certain trends in your traffic from a certain country and update your site’s content in their language or send them an email. If most of your converted visitors are from a foreign country, you might decide to do more advertising on partner sites in their language. The possibilities are virtually endless. With keywords, segmentation is also crucial: you can save a lot on dropping many useless keywords that don’t generate conversions and increase traffic for those who do.

The hidden agenda of this post was to show you that the essence of your Web Analytics software is not to show you charts and numbers, but to help answer practical questions about your business. But no matter how smart, your web analytics software is just a tool, you still have to dig for the gold yourself. Hopefully, you now know some techniques that will help you get more from your tools, and closer to the gold in your data. With this post I am officially ending the beginner’s part of our Web Analytics blog sequel, which will continue next week with a focus on ROI and conversion, and the more advanced analytic tools used to track them.

Please feel free to leave you comments or questions below!

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