If you watched those Martian space ships as they arrived on Mars in 2004, you know that Beagle crashed on Mars sending very little information about what happened. The NASA Spirit launched later, on the other hand, was designed so that on its descent it sent back simple, but key, information at each critical action step as it went down. Spirit landed successfully; but if there had been any problem NASA would have known where the problem was and then would and then tried to correct it with the second rover that was targeted for descent a few weeks later. Although I don't know what information Beagle was sending back, it apparently wasn't enough for getting an idea of what happened. This illustrates the importance of feedback information for anyone interested in meeting any type of goals.

Military drone aircraft learn, or evolve, with time. As they target and strike the enemy, they learn from previous missions they have been sent out on. Even if the enemy takes one down, it has already sent back to other drones information on what failed so that the other drones can become more "intelligent."

This brings up the importance of getting feedback on how your web site is working and being able to "reprogram" your site as necessary to improve how it works. Web site positioning in the search engines is very dynamic. As soon as you get a top position, someone is going to try to rip you off and steal your position. This means you need to track your site's statistics on a daily basis and change things as necessary.

Taking some Examples

Let’s take some example web sites and see how monitoring can help.

Example 1

The figure at the right shows the statistical hits, files, pageviews, sessions, and transferred kilobytes for a real website during development. Notice that the stats start during November and continue to increase dramatically until January. During the early part of this time most of the hits were from the developer as the pages were developed. Search engine optimization was going on during development; so as the page development matured the increase in the hits became primarily from other users that were beginning to find this site. The green indicates the hits, the blue the files, the purple the pageviews, red the sessions, and the orange the KBs transferred. A paid ad was done on Yahoo at the end of November. At this time the keyword phrase used in the design was competing with 1290 other sites on Yahoo; yet this site was #1 in Yahoo for that keyword phrase when this graph was made.

Although #1 in Yahoo, this same site was buried in Google somewhere. It really was not showing up for anything on any top pages there, even with multiple pages in Google linking to it. This is a fairly common problem I have seen, due to the already-mentioned sandbox effect. Until strong incoming links are built and the site has been there for several months, you will have a hard time getting a good rank in Google’s over 8 billion pages. Yahoo’s rank does depend on the number and quality of the incoming links, but page design is a bigger factor in Yahoo’s ranking. We had an AdWords advertisement going in Google, but that didn’t help ranking any. There was a submission to Open Directory Project for this site, but that can take months to position. The AdWords advertisement, however, is immediately driving hits to this site. The ad just doesn’t affect ranking. In fact, we canceled the ad later rather than fight the sandbox effect.

The monitoring statistics also told us people were coming into the first page but then bouncing. They were not going to the rest of the pages and the conversion rate (people taking action) was low. The solve this, we did major redesign of the home page for a strong call to action. We also did some keyword phrase rework. Since Yahoo will re-index the site every 48 hours with their paid ad, we could see the effect of our changes quickly. The counts soared, and people started looking at more than the first page.

Example 2

Here is another monitor graph of a real web site during development. The difference here is that the client did not pay for any search engine optimization and had strong ideas how he wanted the site done, which violated some basic SEO rules. The home page of the site contained two large linked graphics with no text. There was nothing for the search engines to use for indexing and there was no site map to provide any crawl-down. The hits were there during the development, but everything falls off after that. There’s a great web site there, but unless he has off-line advertising he won’t get much in the way of hits. There are a lot of ways this could be turned around if the client wished to put the work into it.

Getting Your Web Site Statistics

What You Need

Here is some of the primary information you need for your decisions:

Hits – This is the number of hits on your site. Loading a single page normally involves multiple hits. Loading the basic file is one hit. Loading each graphic, Flash file, or include file on a page counts as an additional hit.

Pageviews – This is more accurate, as it counts the number of pages loaded.

Visitors – How many visitors are you getting? Daily? Weekly? How many of these are unique?

Sessions – This tells you how sessions your site has supported by these visitors. Some people, however, may have had multiple sessions.

Entrance Pages – This tells you the pages through which people entered your site and the counts on these.

Search Terms – This tells you what search terms people used in the search engines to get to your site. You should also be able to see what search engines are helping you the most.

Counts by Page – What pages are getting the most hits?

Linking in – What other web sites are working for you and sending you traffic?

Errors – What errors were encountered by your visitors?

Bounce Rate – percentage of users that leave a web site after visiting only the entrance page.

These terms vary with the monitor system your host uses and most monitoring systems give you far more than this. You should also be able to view any of the above over any period of time in the past, with graphic data showing changes with the days and months.

Other Things to Track

• What is my position when I query on my keyword phrase? Monitor this in all major search engines.
• How many links come into my site? What is the quality of these links? Where do the links come from? You should verify your incoming links very frequently. Some do it daily.

Identify where changes are coming from in your statistics. If these are adversely affecting your hits and position, find out why. If you are getting the hits but little action, this means redesign work on the site, including the content.

Google Analytics

We use AWstats on business sites using our host to site to track various statistics. My host provides it as a free service for me and my clients.

Google purchased the Urchin company with the apparent goal of providing a wonderful tool for everyone and provide it free on Google. Google says this is for anyone; but Google lends to giving priority to its Adwords advertisers. You can access the entry page at:

http://www.google.com/analytics

A good place to start if you wish to use Google tools is the Webmaster Central. Google has free tools that can provide information on how well your site is working. We strongly suggest using other tools to monitor your site from your own hosting system. These Google tools are valuable, however, if you are trying to diagnose a problem when Google is not ranking you properly. The central entry point for these Google tools is:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Remember that it is essential to monitor your site is working. With one of our sites, we were supprised that most people are coming into the site on a certain page - not on the home page. That told me something about the site and what changes needed to be made. Let us help you with your site on this.

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