Visitors to Your Site: Who Are They and What Do They Want?

So you’ve set up a lovely website or have begun blogging for your ADR or mediation business. Who’s visiting your site? What’s attracting them? What content is most and least viewed? How are they finding you? How long are they staying and do they visit more than one page before leaving? How many “hits” on your site are real people instead of search engine robots?

It’s time for web analytics, those programs or services that help you track and measure the answers to questions like these. The answers help you modify your site to do more of what works and tweak what isn’t working. It’s never wise to consider your website “done” if you are truly serious about making it an engaging site for prospective clients.

There are both free and fee-based web analytics services and some of the free ones are terrific. All of the ones listed below are either completely free or have a free option among its service levels.

For traditional, static websites, the following analytics services are worth your inspection:

• Google Analytics: Once available by invitation only, Google Analytics became available to everyone in mid-August. Google boasts that “Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.” Well, that’s so true that you may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer amount and types of data this service provides. If that’s the case, you can focus on a few things of most importance and mine that data for its greatest value to you. Available in multiple languages, Google Analytics will show you how visitors interact with your site and help you identify the “navigational bottlenecks” that frustrate or turn away prospective clients.
• Site Meter: A straightforward, simple metrics service, Site Meter allows you to view data on recent visits by location, referral source, search words, by entry page (which is the first page the visitor landed on), by exit page (where did they either lose interest or finish getting the information they wanted?), and more.
• Additional site metrics programs that are widely recommended include W3Counter, AWStats, and StatCounter.

For blog websites, it’s worth looking into the following analytics services in addition to any of the above:

• FeedBurner: For both blogs and podcasts. In addition to analytics, FeedBurner makes your feed easy for folks to subscribe and ensures it’s properly formatted for successful distribution to all the major feed directories. The Standard Stats package will tell you how many people are subscribed to your feed, what service/program they used to subscribe (Bloglines, NewsGator, etc.), and “uncommon uses,” those places where your feed content is referenced or clicked and that FeedBurner does not recognize as a common feed service. This latter is a very helpful way to find “scrapers,” who take your site’s content and re-use it (without your permission) to make money from ads on their site. That’s how I found a scraper last spring.
• Performancing Metrics: This free blog stats service tells you the number of visitors to your blog over a designated period, from what parts of the world they visited, what browsers they use, what posts got the most views, what other sites referred traffic to you, what search terms people used to find you, and more.
• Additional services worth a look include 103bees and BlogBeat. The latter was acquired by FeedBurner and isn’t accepting new users at the moment. It’s a terrific service that will eventually be integrated into FeedBurner (to read more about that, just click on my link to BlogBeat).

You may find it helpful to use more than one analytics service, since you’ll probably get slightly different data from each. Collectively, they’ll give you a more accurate picture of your site’s usage, successes and must-tweaks.