Digital Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Analytics, Web Design

Did you really reach 1million visitors on your blog or website in less than a year! Look closer, are you reading the web traffic reports correctly?

Before rushing into a hasty announcement about your web traffic numbers and over promising advertisers, read further to understand what really counts when it comes to web traffic.

Unless you are selling everything for $1 or giving away free iPad 2 for all then it is impossible to reach 1 million sustained actual visitors to your blog or portal in less than a year.

I admit reading reports is not easy it’s a task of a trained web analyst with the right skills to extract the numbers and bring the intelligence behind them, but I will lay out few simple facts for you to help you extract the true performance numbers on your web analytics report.

You must understand first the two main key measurements you need to focus on, they are “Hits’ and “Page Views”; website “Hits” are not to be measured by when it comes to web traffic, simply because a “Hit” on your website is the retrieval of any file, like a page or graphic and other resources such as scripts like .js and .css files etc… from a Web server, so one visitor can generate 4 hits or more at the same instant.  Therefore the hits number showing on the web analytical report is an arbitrary number reflecting on the page content. Do not get caught up in the dramatic numbers the “hits” indicate; it’s always misleading!

The real deal is the “Page View” this is your bread and butter; a “Pages view” is the single page logged on your web analytics report. One “page view can generate” many hits. Simply a “page view” is the page you requested to view; the “hit” is the page and the things it carries.

So if you are selling advertisement, then you must reveal the “page views” this is what the advertisers are interested in, and they will choose the number of impressions they needs to buy; an “impression” is made upon the deliverability of the ad banner to the end user’s request, an impression is generated every time a users interacts with your page so one user can register one or much more impressions in one session.

Now! web analytics does not end at “page views” or “impressions”, if you are managing a blog or you are an advertiser you need to look beyond the “impression”. Get bigger glasses role up your sleeves and look closer, numbers that must not go unnoticed are:

If you are site manager look out for: Unique Visitors, Loyalty (Recency, latency, Length of visit, Depth of visit), Content (types of content views).

If you are an advertiser: first you care about number of “Page Views” then you must dig into the visitor behavior performance, to make sure the site has what you need. First you must look at “Page Views”, and then comes user behavior; which consists of content viewed, loyalty of viewers and over all usage of the site, this will give you as an advertiser insights on the overall health of the “Page views” and consequently the “impressions” you are purchasing. Usually the “publisher” does not reveal that much depth stats reports not because he is holding information from you but because providing intelligent reports requires more than just reading the numbers, so compiling reports and analyzing are a costly task. But you as an advertiser can ask the publisher for performance review in any form.

The truth is Web Analytics is a science helping you in every aspect of running your website or blog, when “actionable web analysis” is practiced to the fullest potential you are able to see how your website is performing and how you can optimize it for better performance. Ideally a full time Web Analyst must be on board to cater for this task. But now from this article you got the main and key information to help you manage your blog/website on your own.

by Dawser Al Hadidi

Great efforts and big budgets are being put into designing websites. More often than not, these polished looking expensive couture sites are doomed to fail because of the way the company and its stakeholders tend to think.

Generally when companies embark on designing or revamping their website, they are full of ideas, needs, and visions! These grand thoughts are almost always about the surface of things, the look and feel of the brand and how it can be reflected in the site, how it shows off their capabilities and how it sells their products and services, how shiny and glossy it all must look. And who can blame them? But somewhere in there the consumer, the user gets lost on them. Have we thought of the personas and the scenarios of who exactly accesses the site? Unfortunately, from what I have seen in the long time since I have started developing sites, almost none of the companies spend enough of an effort designing for the types of customers they want to attract.

The days of a website being “just” your brand’s reflection are over! Your website is now your digital sales tool, whose main job is to direct the customer to a sales path, and ensure conversions from most visits.

In studying the concept of creating “persona” to represent your customers and their different characters, I have found that it is an exercise essential to building a website that talks to your consumer and brings you the results you are expecting.

Persona creation is similar to TV character development for a series or a movie, however, the root of those characters is driven strictly from reality, they are existing people who you may have met and interacted with. They are types of people who represent a certain group of individuals. In Persona development for your website you will go further in analyzing these characters, their mindset and various behaviors as they decide to buy a product or service from you.

The result of this exercise will give you, several personas based on your existing and targeted customers, with names, photos, and description.

The following is an example of “persona” for a fashion-clothing site:

Mona: 35 years old, loves to look at new styles, adores fashion, and is ready to buy anything that makes her look unique. She is however conscience of her spending, but if she feels the item is worth the spend; she will go ahead with the purchase despite the fact that she might regret it later.

Dina: 29 years old, stay at home mom, with two kids, very keen on looking good when she’s out on the town with her husband, but when it comes to outing with the kids, she needs to be comfortable and look OK. She is always on a budget and never spends too much.

So, your fashion website will be catering to these two characters. In giving Mona the stylish pieces, which makes her, look unique. She will continue to come to your site looking for distinctive fashion items that will make her look and feel great. So for Mona, you present this to her using trigger word such as, “look different with these Harem pants from River Island”. For Dina, the trigger will differ, she will come looking for 2 different criteria one for comfort, another for a night out. Offer Dina two options, a category that says,Daytime Playtime, and one that reads Nighttime Glamour.

The conclusion is that you end up with a user centric site equipped with persuasive scenarios to achieve maximize conversions, a website that not only sells but also looks great and polished! Think from the outside to the inside and impress your customer.