Website Analytics Software

A prolific amount of detailed statistics is available to help you analyze the traffic visiting your websites as well as the efficacy of your affiliate programs.  unlike a brick and mortar store, online businesses track an infinite number of variables to help you gauge productivity.  There are many obvious ones you should be tracking and analyzing such as, number of visitors, and number of page views daily weekly and monthly.  However, you should also be taking the time to analyze how users are getting to your website pages.  Take a look at the source pages where users are originating from as well as the very important search keywords they are using on the search engines that ultimately sends them to your pages.  All of these statistics will tell you where and how users are arriving at your site.  This will give you a grade on how well your marketing efforts have been doing.  Moreover, this will give you an indication of how much more work is ahead and possibly which direction to pursue next. 

For example, if most of your users are arriving to your website via the homepage and all are arriving due to keyword searches, that tells you that that your home page is optimized and listed in the search engines - but your other pages are not performing as well.  Additionally, the statistics list  which of your site pages are the most popular - you can edit your most popular pages to try to steer your customers to other pages on your site.  Your goal should be to have visitors arriving at your site and viewing as many of the pages as possible on your site.  You want to avoid visitors that than just a few seconds or you just one or two pages of your site then exit - i.e. a high bounce rate.

Maximize your ROI

When evaluating your website, consider taking a look at your Return on Investment (ROI).   Your website and affiliate statistics (web analytics) will tell you a lot about your current performance as well as what to work on.

Most affiliate programs will offer a detailed statistics for your sites such as click-through percentage rates, effective per click dollar amounts, total sales, and of course commissions earned.  Additionally, many programs allow you to track types of banners and even individual banners - this allows you to track which pages perform better than others as well as what banner locations on certain pages perform better than others.  A certain page may have a banner that produces better because it appears higher on the page.  Another page may have a banner that produces better because it is surrounded by copy text that the user finds very interesting more worthwhile reading.  As you can probably tell, affiliate marketing is a continually evolving and continually improving process.  You should the constantly evaluating yourself, your efforts, and your web pages.  If you find a certain configuration that works well, stick with it and possibly replicate that on your others pages or other sites.  With that said, if I find a model that works I will stick to that model.  That may mean an effective page template, or an effective font size or color, or simply how to best integrate certain banner or text ads within my sites.

Eventually, as your traffic picks up, your sales and commissions should also pick up, and eventually you may become a top producer for one or many affiliate programs.  This status brings about several perks, including perhaps higher commission rates, one on one relationships what dedicated affiliate managers who know you by name, bigger payouts, and of course - monetary bonuses.

Web Analytics for Dummies
I am grateful for Web Analytics for Dummies efforts to lay out what was once Greek to me comprehensively and in basic terms. Before its purchase, I was going to go so far as pay someone to do my analytics for me; but now I can positively say I [think] I am capable of doing the job myself.

 

Web Analytics an Hour a Day
'Web Analytics: An Hour a Day' describes in an absorbing and insightful way the most important topics for a Web Analyst or any professional related to the management of a website. Topics covered include: basic terminology, tool selection/implementation, online segmentation, conversion rates improvement, competitive analysis, and many others.