Web Site Analytics: Read Between The Lines (And Charts, And

Web Site Analytics: Read Between The Lines (And Charts, And Graphs)

Traffic analysis is a key ingredient in online marketing success. The numbers, charts and graphs provided by your favorite web statistics software are invaluable.

But it’s not until you begin to interpret those statistics as part of a larger picture that you’ll receive the full value of your web analytics software.

A software package can only return so many lines of data. And most of them do a good job at providing the most important ones. But your real insights will be found at the intersection of two, three, or even more of these statistics.

It’s up to you to interpret what you see and turn it into useful information, rather than staring blankly at the numbers and recognizing a trend. When you see a trend you like or don’t like, your natural tendency is to try to emphasize the conditions that caused the positive trends and eliminate the conditions that led to negative trends. But how?

By digging. Let’s say your visits are down. Now, you have to ask yourself why? Perhaps, upon further investigation, you see that the downturn in traffic is...