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.

To start with, you must collect the data. If you have a web analytics tool installed, it may already be doing the stuff for you. You need to include all aspects of your website that collect data. Such aspects include CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and other kinds of data that your website generates.

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.

With all the collected and transformed data, you can easily proceed with your analysis now. This is arguably the most interesting part of your web analysis campaign. You need to identify a trend in the traffic flow. Following points would help you do just the same.

Do more visitors visit your site at a specific time? Which of your pages are the most commonly visited ones? How many pages does a visitor visit on an average? For how long does a visitor stay in the site? How much traffic do you get from the search engines? What are the exit pages of your website? Who has linked to your website?

Once you have completed the analysis of your website, you need to asses the reports and set new bench marks for the improvement. You must make action plans and execute them well. You may want to add more business ads to your hot pages, and promote the pages that are not very frequently viewed. Identify the weak points and improve upon them. Your aim must be to cash in on your strong points, and improve on the weak ones.

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.