If you are a website owner, chances are you’ve often wondered about web statistics (also known as web site statistics or website analytics) and how you can utilize online statistics for your marketing campaigns. Any business-minded professional thinks about the importance of knowing your customers and retaining them. Web statistics form an integral part of any digital marketing strategy as it allows business owners to analyze trends and changes in their website.

Do you know how people are finding your website through the search engines? Do you know what search engines your website is optimized for? Web statistics can report on both things. How about navigation paths, entry pages, exit pages and top pages? Again, web site statistics will allow you to report on all of these. Web statistics are real-time and very cost-effective.

In addition, good web statistics systems will allow you to determine your return on investment, ecommerce statistics and eventual cost per customer. It’s a handy tool for picking apart your web site, making it better and re-launching to hit your target market. Here are some of the features and benefits associated with web statistics.

Web statistics allows you to increase your online leads and sales. Here are 3 common features:

Increase Search Engine Traffic
With web statistics, you will be able to see where your customers are coming from. You will be able to determine what keywords the user typed in to find your website, to the actual search engine they browsed or how they came to your site through other websites. In addition, web statistics allows you can examine search engine visitor trends which will give you valuable feedback in the maintenance of your search engine strategies.

Promotion Tracking
Web statistics provides you a tool to increase the effectiveness of any online campaign. Whether it be banner ads, affiliates, promotions, email marketing etc, you will be able to determine the highest revenue stream through web statistics reporting.

Ecommerce Tracking
Another great feature of web statistics or ecommerce statistics is that you will be able to produce real-time reports on ecommerce performance. The typical ecommerce web statistics reports will tell you the number of orders, orders per customer and how much revenue your site is generating. Web statistics provide a very detailed report on your return on investment.

Web statistics allows you to track and analyze web site behaviour. Here are three common features:

Visitor Browsing Habits and Trends
Once a visitor lands on the website, it is important for you to track user behaviour. Web statistics will track navigation paths (i.e. how they click through your website). The reports will tell you which pages they looked at and in what order. Using these web statistics, you can drive traffic through your website and lead people to a call-to-action.

Increase Usability and User Satisfaction
Through web statistics, you will know exactly what visitors prefer in terms of content, images and information. By using these web statistics reports, you will be able to adjust your website according to these trends. This will increase your page views, customer retention and satisfaction. Web statistics is a tool used to continually improve your website.

Increase Conversion Rates
By eliminating bottlenecks within your online store checkout process, you will be able to increase online sales. Web statistics will improve your return on investment by detailing user behaviour through the ecommerce web site.

Web statistics allows you to monitor your website using a variety of online tools and formats. Here are three common features:

Online Reporting
Most web statistics systems provide you with usable administrative interfaces. You will be supplied with a login account to see real-team web site reporting and web analytics and web statistics. Some web statistics are even Flash-based.

Scheduling
Everyone knows that being busy is a fact of life. Web statistics programs make it easy for webmasters and maintenance teams by allowing scheduled reports. These can also be emailed to specified email accounts through the web statistics programs.

Exporting
All reports can be easily exported into a variety of formats including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF, HTML etc. Web statistics can be read in a variety of different programs.

In summary, web statistics and web stats form a vital part in the digital marketing cycle. By not using web statistics, you are essentially driving without your eyes. Web stats will guide you through generating relevant leads and sales, customer retention and monitoring as well as easy reporting and scheduling. There are numerous of web statistics software on the market. Test drive them before committing to a single web analytics system for your website as the functionality, pricing and usability of each are different.

Web statistics will save you time and money in developing a solid digital marketing strategy for your website. Try web statistics today and you won’t be disappointed.