All websites should come with a statistical reporting tool which will allow clients to view information about website usage. The simple statistics packages tell you how many people visited your site, where did they come from, how long they spent on the site and so on.
That's all very well and good but...
The next level is where I specialise in. If you are running a commerical website, then there are several questions which traditional web stats can't answer:
- Where are my sales coming from?
- Why are so many people leaving the site?
- What was the impact on web sales from my latest advertising campaign?
- I'm paying for PPC - what is my cost-per-sale ratio?
- How much of my traffic is just noise?
- Which search terms attract the most sales?
- Which search engines are indexing me?
- What is my search rankings per key phrase?
- My customers - who are they?
I have developed a combination of bespoke and off-the-shelf systems whereby the answers to these questions can be found in a easy to view, realtime format. Of special mention is a plug-in I developed to marry customer data with the Mosaic classifications database, so in realtime any client can see what the profile mix of their customers are.
