The Perpetual Website Enhancement Cycle
One of the key indicators of a website’s success and its ability to generate income is the amount of targeted traffic it receives. What is targeted traffic? This refers to the traffic you receive that is related to the niche or market your website is aimed at. For example, if your website is about horses for the purposes of selling horse products and gadgets, getting traffic from people doing searches with the keyword “dogs” on Google will be of little value. If you don’t know what the aim of your website is, please take time to do this now.
My Mr.Gadget website is aimed at selling gadgets in Australia. If you do a search in Google for “gadget australia”, you’ll see we are (hope we still are at this time of reading) number one for this search result. This took many months of research, tweaking and hard work.
In order to increase your targeted traffic you need to understand what keyword, websites, sources are bringing you in traffic. Based on your understanding of this, you can then tweak or optimize your website to attract even more traffic and therefore increase your website revenue. Ka-ching!
Coming from an IT background, I like to break things down into simple forms to understand a concept. Understanding your website traffic is part of what I like to call the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle. This is a structured process flow that describes the installation of a metrics tool through to highlighting the re-iterative nature of website tweaking. I believe that all successful websites follow this general flow with some modifications here and there.
Here is the Perpetual Web Enhancement Cycle presented in a flow diagram:
Step 1. Install a Website Traffic Analytic Tool
Like any close friendship, you need to spend time and effort getting to know your companion so you can truly get the best out of each other. This is exactly the same with your web traffic. How does one do this? First things first, install a website traffic analytic tool (WTAT). As the name suggests the primary role of this tool is to gather information on the traffic that comes in and out of your site.
Popular Web Traffic Analytic Tools To Try Out:
- Sitemeter (Using this now for 2 sites)
- Statcounter
- Google Analytics
- Urchin
- AWStats
Step 2. Burn in WTAT for 30 days
Once you’ve found a tool that you like, give it 30 days to gather information on your website. Most of them will ask you to install a script on each page to trigger data collection so make sure you follow all the prescribed steps. After 30 days, you’ll have a workable data set.
Step 3. Perform Initial Website Traffic Analysis
Now that you have a full months worth of website traffic data, you should be able to answer some of the important questions like:
1. What are the top 20 keywords people are using to find my website?
2. How many unique visitors do I get per day / month?
3. How many page impressions per day / month?
4. Where are most of my visitors from?
5. At what time of the day is my site most visited?
6. What day is the most popular?
7. What page do most of my visitors enter in?
8. What page do most of my visitors exit from?
9. What are the slowest days of the week?
10. What kind of systems / displays are my users using?
There are many more questions to ask, but just by answering these 10 questions above will give you a pretty good indication of who is visiting your website and what’s helping you attract traffic.
I recommend doing this at least every 30 days. I view my web stats on a daily basis though since I like to gauge the performance of specific posts on my blog.
Step 4. Tweak and Optimize Website
The Perpetual Website Enhancement Cycle begins…
This step is another whole topic on its own as it stretches into the realm of search engine optimization (SEO) but in general it’s all about using the results of your analysis, comparing it against your website goals then if necessary changing things up a bit. For example, if you run clothing website and want to promote more of your summer range, since summer is a couple of weeks away, you’d tweak your site to have more pages talking about summer clothing. Your success would depend on how much “summer clothing” traffic you brought in when you review again next month.
If you run an online store and notice that you are getting a lot of hits for “iPod accessories” but not a lot of sales, you would then adjust pricing to compete against competitors. Your success metric would be how much more iPod accessories sales increased by. The amazing thing about the Internet is the speed at which tweaks / optimizations can translate into more traffic and sales.
It’s this adaptation for better results that makes having a successful website so challenging. One only has to visit their favourite websites and you’ll see that these top websites change their color schemes, fonts, image/ad placement very regularly. All with the aim of finding that optimized web revenue machine. A good example is Darren Rowse’s Problogger Website. He is continually adjusting and tweaking this site - it looks a whole lot different than it did 2 years ago. I guarantee that as a result his website traffic has grown and as well as his online revenue.
A lot of my other friends have updated their websites too:
- Dancing About Architecture
- All for Women
- Crazy Meezer
- Geek Speak
- Zen Elements
- DJ Feinx
- In Denial Health
- I See My Life
- Appassionato
Step 5. is the same as step 3. and continues the ongoing cycle of enhancing your website for maximum performance.
This article was written for those embarking on developing and maintaining their own website. Perhaps for the web pro, this helped conceptualize what they have been doing for months / years.
Either way please provide your feedback and comments.
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Since I’m just now really getting into building traffice to my blog and other sites, it’s good to see someone put out free info on the subject.
30 day review I think is key and I’m gonna start doing this asap.
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Write a blog post comparing the different statistics services and choose the best one out of them all.