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 Issue #45 - May 3rd, 2004 Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses
Brought to you by idesignbusiness.com http://www.idesignbusiness.com Issue # 45 Monday, May 3rd, 2004 In this Issue: ARTICLES: ONLINE POLL: FREE RESOURCE: Welcome to issue # 45 of the idesignbusiness Internet Marketing Newsletter. Recently I have spent much of my time helping clients track conversions on their websites. Conversions can include newsletter subscriptions, Pay-per-Click campaigns, free registrations, or online sales. The one common denominator I have found from all these projects is that a solid understanding of website traffic is required to be effective. I have also found that a basic understanding of visitors, page views, and referrals is not always common Internet knowledge. Hopefully this article will help you fully-understand how to evaluate your website traffic in a simple way. We would love to hear any questions, comments, or ideas for future articles, just email us at newsletters@idesignbusiness.com Did you miss the last issue? You can always visit our idesignbusiness Internet Newsletter Archive and easily view and search all our past issues. Neal St. Clair idesignbusiness Endorsement MailBlocks - The Email You Want. The Spam You Don‘t. Sick of SPAM email? I was, so I decided to do something about it and see what options I had to combat unwanted emails. What I found was a great service called MailBlocks that lets you create a new email account that will be SPAM free or protect your current email address(es). Whether you want to start fresh with a new email address or stop unwanted messages to your current email address you won‘t be disappointed with MailBlocks. They offer 3 levels of service, including a FREE Account, so try it today and stop receiving unwanted emails for good! www.mailblocks.com Online Poll Is Your Business Based in the United States? ARTICLE Understanding Your Website Traffic By Neal St. Clair Before I get ahead of myself in this article I have one simple question - Are You Tracking Your Website Traffic? If you answered NO then stop reading right now and sign up for a free account with WebSTAT. They offer a FREE website traffic monitoring service that is the best I have seen and very easy to implement. Click here to Sign up for WebSTAT O.K., now that no one has a reason not to be tracking their website traffic let‘s define a few terms so everyone can correctly understand their website traffic. Unique Visitors This is probably the most important number to look at when evaluating your traffic. Unique visitors are determined by IP address and it is important to stress the term unique. For example, let‘s assume you are looking at your traffic for April 2004. If someone visited your site 5 times in the month they would only be counted once because this statistic only looks at unique visitors within a specific time period. Page Views Page views gives you the total number of times the pages on your site were viewed. One visitor could generate 10 page views by visiting 10 different pages of your site. Even if they looked at the same page twice that would count as 2 page views. You can determine the “stickiness” of your site by dividing the number of page views you have by the number of unique visitors. This will tell you how many pages each visitor looks at on average. The more pages the better and the more “sticky” your site is. New Visitors This will tell you how many of visitors from the total number of unique visitors visited your website for the first time. Return Visitors This number is the number of people that have visited your site more than once in a given report period. Visited Pages This stat will tell you what the most popular pages on your site are. Visitor Paths This will show you the most common paths through your website. This is very important in evaluating your links and navigation scheme. You can very quickly understand what links are working and which ones aren‘t. Referring URLs Every wonder where your website traffic is coming from? This statistic will tell you. You can determine how well you are doing in Search Engines, what affiliates are producing, and what links are working best. There are many other metrics you can look at the but the list above will give you a very good understanding of your website traffic and how visitors are using your site. From that information you can make many adjustments and updates to your site. For example:
If people are leaving your site after looking at only 1 or 2 pages then the answer is probably YES!. Make sure the most popular pages on your site are pages where you are collecting information or selling your products and services. Update your navigation and links to ensure those pages are easily accessible. If not then you need to provide some incentive to keep people coming back. A newsletter or original content that is frequently updated should do the trick. For more information or to ask specific questions please send us an email to info@idesignbusiness.com Advertisement Don‘t Pay More Than $9.95 month For websites Hosting! If you are paying more than $9.95 per month for websites and email hosting than you are paying too much! idesignbusiness provides affordable and RELIABLE websites hosting with comparable features to much more expensive plans. * Newsletter Subscribers - Enter promotional code HELIUM and you‘re setup fee will be waived...Sign up today! Click here to learn more. FREE RESOURCE: Each issue of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses will include helpful free online resources to promote your websites. The big news in the world of Internet Marketing in the last few weeks has been Yahoo‘s announcement that are launching their own search engine and will not be using Google‘s search results any longer. What does this mean to you? MAKE SURE YOUR SITE IS LISTED WITH YAHOO! They are accepting submissions now and it doesn‘t cost a thing to submit your site. Of course they do have paying options to get your site listed faster but since this is the free resource section I assume you are looking for a bargain! Click on the link below to submit your site to Yahoo! Yahoo! Free Site Submission ABOUT idesignbusiness idesignbusiness provides complete Internet services for small businesses including website design, website development, hosting and Internet marketing. Increase website traffic, build your customer base, and drive revenue using our cost-effective and result driven tools and services. Please visit http://www.idesignbusiness.com for more information. SUBSCRIPTION NOTICE This newsletter is only sent to opt-in subscribers. If at anytime you would like to be removed from this list, please send an e-mail to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com with REMOVE in the subject line or click on the remove link below. Spread the word - Please forward to friends and colleagues. Copyright 2002 - 2004 idesignbusiness http://www.idesignbusiness.com |
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