It may be easier to measure the success of an ecommerce website, but more traditional company websites can also benefit from tracking visitors to ultimately increase their return.

The bottom line in ignoring or not getting around to monitoring your sites usage is youll be missing out on sales and potentially enormous profits. For instance, without tracking your visitors behaviour and site statistics, you would not know if or why:

• The majority if your traffic is coming from the US instead of the UK, and as such youre losing out on generating countless new sales through national traffic.
• People are actually finding your site by searching for Service B, but youre really pushing Service A in ignorance, believing this is what will sell.
• Customers are abandoning your shopping cart before making a purchase.
• Users are deserting your site after only viewing the home page.

You can have all the traffic in the world coming to your website, but unless these visitors are converting into customers (or even prospects!), your traffic is completely worthless. So, as conversion is the name of the game, you need to evaluate your visitors, their browsing behaviour, and your web analytics against your sites key objectives.

In the very least, a key objective of your website is likely to be to maximise the chance of a visitor contacting us for more information on our services/products. Additionally, perhaps youre keen to encourage visitors to sign-up for a newsletter, and you should also prioritise effectively educating a potential client with enough information so as to minimise time spent on sales calls.

With tracking mechanisms in place, youre allowing your business to effectively calculate its websites return on investment, taking into account its initial cost and the cost of ongoing marketing.

So, why bother?

In a nutshell, there are two critical reasons for tracking your websites visitors, which are:

1. To evaluate your sites performance on an ongoing basis, such that you can decide exactly what improvements need to be made to your website and when, in order to increase sales.
2. To determine if the changes you make to your site increase your conversion rate; you need an initial benchmark in order to measure change.

What to track:

Generally, you need to be aware of tracking the following:

1. How many visitors complete your sites main objective? (For example: buy a product on an ecommerce site, or call your company for more information.)
2. What is each visitor potentially worth to your company?
3. Who is sending you traffic (which sites are referring traffic to your website)?
4. Why did your visitors come to your site (i.e. what keywords did they search for)?
5. What page did they land on?
6. What page did they exit from?
7. What was their path through the site (what pages did they visit)?
8. Where are your visitors coming from (geographic location)?
9. Site-wide conversion rate
10. Product conversion rates
11. Percentage of new and returning visitors
12. Sales per visitor
13. Average order value
14. Average number of items purchased (especially for ecommerce sites)
15. Shopping cart abandonment rate (step conversions) for ecommerce sites
16. Revenue and Profit per product
17. Repeat order rate, to help calculate long term value
18. Cost per visit
19. Profit per website visit

How to kick-start tracking your visitors and evaluating your sites performance:

1. For every incoming sales call or email you receive, make sure your company finds out (and logs!) exactly how the customer found your website.
2. Use log-based or browser-based tracking on your website. If you are on shared hosting, ask your hosting provider what (log-based) web analytics services they offer on your account. Generally these are inclusive, so you may not have to pay any more than youre already paying for your hosting.

Should we invest in a log-based or browser-based service?

Tracking tools that rely on log-based measurement are typically software thats installed on your web server. Log-based measurement software reads the text files (referred to as log files) held on the web server and displays your information in a user-friendly format, often as graphs and charts.

Browser-based measurement services work differently however, in that information from the browser of every user that visits your website is recorded, usually in a database. From this the data is then again typically displayed as user-friendly reports so that you can easily make sense of them. Usually, browser-based measurement services ask you to paste some JavaScript code into your web pages which sends visitor information to a remote server so that you can then log in to view the reports.

I recommend the use of browser-based tracking for one simple reason: browser-based tools stick to measuring how people using a web browser use your website, rather than incorporating in their reports the multitude of email harvesters, search engines and other software generated crawlers that get counted as visitors in log-based tracking. These non-human visitors can seriously skew your results and give you a false indication of the total visitors coming to your site. This ultimately means that its impossible to accurately analyse your data, and you therefore cant be completely sure that youre making effective site changes to increase your sales.

David Crowther is the director of NerveCentral, whose mission is simple: to maximise its clients business and profit through the web. We have provided web solutions for many organisations and small companies, including well-known corporates such as Thomson Travel Group, Q8, Edding, GlaxoSmithKline, Galderma, and Hertz. Download our concise but (very) useful guide 5 (Often Missed) Usability Tips for your Website to Increase Profit now!