Your website development is a potential gold mine. It can take your business from so-so to WOW! All you need to do is learn how to use your statistical information to help you get it done.

Website statistics can tell you a lot of things. They can show you which products are doing well and which are not. Find out what visitors like about your website development, and what they don’t like too. Are your keywords working? That needs to be explained as well.

When you start planning your business, you need to develop a business plan that will help map out where you see your sales going from one year to the next. With online businesses you can do this through website statistics. These are measurements of various activities on your website that directly relate to your business.

Website Statistics.

Traffic is paramount. If you don’t get traffic, sales will not follow and your business will stagnate. Your marketing plan outlines how you will proceed with getting that traffic. But, it’s definitely not foolproof.

You won’t know if your efforts are working unless you measure them. This is where statistics come in. What do you measure? Here are a few examples:

* Unique visitors (different people going to your site).
* Keyword analysis (which keywords bring in traffic and which don’t).
* Conversion rates (to track when visitors progress from reading to actually buying).
* Web page analysis (where visitors go when they are on your site).
* Page views (how many people visit each unique page on your website).

These are just some of the statistics you should know about. When you first begin marketing your site, statistics can help you find out if you’re on the right page, so to speak.

Do the keywords you use drive traffic?

While you can gather statistics monthly, sometimes it takes a few months to identify a trend. Analysing a trend can show you if your current plan is working. As such, you should not make too many changes to your plan, allowing several months to see if anything is working or not. When starting out, it often takes that long to accurately identify sales.

Site stats give you a starting point. Without some way to measure your business efforts it’s like shooting in the dark – you don’t know if you’ve hit or miss. Analyse everything from an overall perspective and you’ll get a better idea of what to change as you move forward.

To start off with, make sure you have a way to measure site information, right now. You can get both free and paid software tools to help you with this task. You can also hire companies to measure that information for you and analyse the data to anticipate the next move that you need to make. But, for small online business endeavours, using software to compile the data and your own brain to analyse it will suffice.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Experienced Executive Virtual Assistant who collaborates with businesses and individuals with the sole aim of accomplishing their professional goals. Want to learn more about these comprehensive online business building success strategies? Contact VMF Today!