In case you have a website, and want to know who is visiting it, you will need a web analytics tool. Of course, you could directly check the log and understand the behavior of users on your website. However, if there are too many records to read through, it can be a daunting task. A web analytics tool is a perfect piece of software that will give you the regular reports about who is visiting your website and how many times. You however need to know, how to use this utility effectively. Following is the explanation of the same.

Firstly, you need to collect the data. In case you have a web analytics tool, it may well be collecting all the logs for you. You must remember to include all the parts of your website that may be collecting the data. Such parts may include CGI logs, Web logs, forms (email requests), and any other data that your website may be generating.

Once you have successfully collected the data, it needs to be transformed. It can be a tedious task to review the web logs manually. You would therefore need to transform the available data into an easily understandable format that can be manipulated. Most of the web analytics tools do this functionality as well. However, certain non-web log formatted data such as CGI may need you do the conversion.

Now that you have all the data available to you, in an easy to understand format; you need to start your analysis. This should be the most interesting part of your web analytics task. What you should be looking for is the trend in your web traffic. Following are some of the points to figure out the trend –
Is there a specific time when most of your visitors visit your website?
What are the most visited pages of your website?
How many pages does an average user view before quitting your website?
On an average, how long do your visitors stay at the website?
Does your traffic come from the search engines?
What are the most common pages that most of visitors exit your website from?
Who is linked up to your website?

You should now be setting bench marks for yourself. With all the analysis done, you know the strong and weak points of your website. You can now plan your actions and execute them to reach newer standards. For instance, you could add more business links to the pages that are frequently visited by the people, and optimize the lesser visited ones for more traffic flow. In short, you should work in a direction to capitalize on the strong aspects of your website and improve on the weaker aspects.

You need to attract your visitors. Once you know that you need to make changes to your website, based on your web analytics, you will need to make the changes in a way that visitors notice them. Unless people know about the updates, there is not much use. For this, you would have to promote your website tactfully, highlighting the updated parts of your website.

You must repeat the above process time and again. This is in fact, a continual process that you must do.your attention at all times.