David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

You may remember back in Lecture 6, I mentioned adding statistics gathering software to www.davidfiske.com

At the moment, it is delivering some decent statistics but there is nothing that really interests me there.

However, the statistics on Compare Sat Nav do excite me.

Why?
 
For starters, the statistics tell me how many visitors I have had. It does not track spiders nor does it track hits. Both of these are misleading.

A spider belongs to a search engine and has no ability to purchase a sat nav system (only if it could...!). Therefore it is not a physical visitor.

Hits are the amount of visitors AND spiders that have visited your site. Some people claim that they have had 1,000,000 hits and hey, that's great. But how many of those converted into a purchaser? How many will come back again. How many hits were the same person?

Just as a general sideline, do not be tempted by outrageous claims made by some unscrupulous companies preying on Internet newbies. Claims such as "We can send a million people to your website - guaranteed" are usually true. But the chances are that these visitors are not genuinely interested in what you offer. The chances are you would get more visitors instantly but you would then notice a significant drop once the million had visited. Plus, the chances are that none of the million would buy anything so you would probably be left out of pocket.

The statistics also tell me what browsers to develop the site for and what resolutions are the most popular.

However, it is the power of keywords that is the most important feature.

I can see a list of the most recent URLs that have sent visitors to my site. I can also see what terms they have typed into search engines to get to the site. This means that I can start developing pages to satisfy the needs of those particular visitors.

Look out for a lot more targeted content!