Also, when you do start to achieve success using online marketing techniques then how do you know precisely what facets of the campaign are working and which aren't?
Also, which parts of your website are performing to expectation and which aren't and, if they aren't performing then why?
This is absolutely critical information and definitely worth spending time on here.
We believe that success should never be the result of an accident but rather the result of consistent and persistent application to details and procedures. That way it can be maintained and improved upon.
So let's go through some of the procedures we offer you as part of our services. . .
In-depth Stats and Reviewing
Daily review of your website's performance with in-depth analysis of every aspect of the web traffic on your site. 'Knowledge is power' is a well known quote, and while most companies may stick to just tools provided by Google Analytics, our service goes miles forward and give you so much knowledge about your website, its visitors, its performance that it empowers you with everything you need to use your website as one of your prime business development and branding avenue. The following critical aspects of the client's website are tracked, logged and analysed in depth.
Visitors / Sessions
When someone visits your web site, your visitor count is incremented by one and a new visitor "session" is started. All actions taken beyond the first one are attached to that visitor session. Sessions "expire" after 30 minutes of inactivity. This means if the visitor leaves and comes back again a few hours later, or they remain on your web site but don't do anything until at least 30 minutes later, your visitor count for the day will be increased again.
Unique Visitors
Your unique visitor count will only be incremented when a visitor comes to your site for the first time that day. If they visit your site five times in one day, your normal visitor count will be incremented by 5, but your unique visitor count will only be incremented by 1. We determine uniqueness by a visitor's IP address. Some services use cookies to try to track a unique visitor, but we do not because of privacy concerns.
Actions
Most Online Marketing Solutions track only track page views, but we also tracks file downloads, outgoing links, and other types of clicks. We group all of these into a term we call "actions". The actions count gives you a much more thorough and accurate picture of visitor activity on your website.
Average time spent
The average amount of time spent on your web site, per visitor.
Total time spent
This figure represents how much cumulative time was spent on your web site across all visitors for the day. If your site gets a decent amount of traffic, this value is typically much larger than "1 day".
Bounce rate
A visitor "bounces" from your site if they only view one page and do nothing else. The bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors who bounced, so a lower value is better.
Traffic sources
This gives you a general break down of how visitors are arriving at your site, which we calculate by analyzing a visitor's referrer data. There are currently 7 categories:
- Direct / Bookmark - How many visitors arrived at your
site with an empty referrer string. This usually means
they typed in your address by hand (direct) or used
a bookmark to get to your page.
- Links - How many visitors arrived via a link from
another web site, excluding search engines
- Searches - How many visitors arrived by an external
search engine
- Advertising - How many visitors arrived via advertisements
you may be running. We determine this by looking at
the domain of the referrer. If it is a major known advertising
domain, or the domain matches certain patterns such
as "ad", "ads", or "pagead", then we put the visitor
in this category.
- Email - How many visitors arrived via email. Only
web mail is supported, however, because clicking on
a link from within a program like Outlook will not send
any referrer data to your site.
- RSS readers - How many visitors arrived via an exteranl
RSS readers, such as Google Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines,
etc.
- Social media - How many visitors arrived via popular social media sites. Supported sites are: twitter, pownce, youtube, myspace, facebook, orkut, digg, reddit, propeller, sphinn, mixx, newsvine, sk-rt, shoutwire, stumbleupon, popurls, fark, metafilter, techmeme, ma.gnolia, flickr, yahoo buzz, del.icio.us, furl, blinklist, dzone, hyves, nujij, ekudos, reporter.msn, and grubb.
When you look at a web page, your web browser sends a whole bunch of data to that page, including something called the referrer. The referrer indicates what page (if any) "referred" you to the current page. For example, if you search for something on Google, and then click on one of the results, your web browser will use the URL of the Google search page as the referrer. This is how we are able to determine what searches and other pages lead visitors to your web site, because our tracking code can access this referrer data. Any time you click a link on a web page, your browser sends the referrer data to the next page you end up on, even if it's on the same web site. We ignore these "internal" referrers, however.
Organizations
A visitor's organization (and hostname) is determined by looking up their IP address in a third party database. It is not 100% accurate, but close to it.
These values represent the company that "owns" that IP address. For example, if someone from Microsoft corporate headquarters visited your site, you would see "Microsoft" as their organization. Unfortunately, many home users can't be identified by anything more accurate than their ISP. Hostnames
A visitor's hostname is what their IP address resolves to for a lookup. For example, one of Google's IP addresses is 64.233.167.99. If a visitor with this IP address came to your web site, then their hostname would be displayed as "google.com".
Outgoing links
An outgoing link is a link on your web site that points to another external web site. We automatically track clicks on these links so you can see how your visitor's are leaving your web site and where you are sending the most traffic to. When a visitor clicks an outgoing link, that action will show up in their visitor session, and the total value for clicks on that link will be incremented by 1.
Downloads
We automatically tracks clicks on any links that point to a file on your web site. Supported file extensions are: 7z, aac, avi, csv, doc, exe, flv, gif, gz, jpg, jpeg, mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpg, mov, pdf, phps, png, ppt, rar, sit, tar, torrent, txt, wma, wmv, xls, xml, and zip. When a visitor clicks a download, that action will show up in their visitor session, and the total value for downloads of that file will be incremented by 1.
Clicks
Along with page views, outgoing links, and downloads, "clicks" represents the fourth and final action type. It can be used to track clicks on anything on your web site.
Recent links / searches
These are logs of all incoming links and searches that have sent a visitor to your site, in reverse chronological order.
Newest unique links / searches
The first time any particular link or search term has sent a visitor to your site, it will show up in these logs along with the time it occured.
Entrance / exit pages
An entrance page, sometimes called a landing page, is the page that a new visitor session starts on. If a visitor comes to your site directly, that will typically be your front page, but visitors coming to your site via searches or other external links will probably be "landing" on other pages initially. The entrance pages section shows which pages are the most popular "first pages" that people see. Likewise, an exit page is the "last" page that a user sees before leaving your web site.
Tag clouds
A tag cloud is a popular "Web 2.0" feature, and generally shows you some form of popular data in a random 2-dimensional order, with the size and colour of each item representing its popularity. Tag clouds give you a new view on your data, and help showcase "long tail" items because they are intermixed with the most popular ones.
Spy **
Spy shows you the same data you will see on the main Actions list page, except that everything is live! You will see page views, downloads, outgoing links, and clicks stream down the spy page as they are happening on your web site. It was inspired by Digg Spy Careful - it's very addictive.
FeedBurner
If your site has an RSS feed, you should be redirecting it through FeedBurner (FB). This is a third party service that monitors how many subscribers you have to your feed(s), and which items are read and clicked on the most. FB has an API that we can talk to retrieve this data for you along with our other reports.
** - This is a special solution that can be setup additional for client's to specially monitor sites during special campaigns, additional marketing strategies giving a complete bird's eye view of what is happening on the site on a real time basis
I hope that you have found this information interesting and enlightening. If you have any further questions regarding this document please do call us 0844 357 9540
We hope to get the chance to work with you!
www.infomedia-direct.com
