This video shows the Logaholic 2.5 Today Dashboard screen and explains how to customize it to fit your needs. Play Video

This video will give you a quick overview on how to use Logaholic Web Analytics. It shows you how to navigate through the software, drill down into information and explains the basic interface elements.
Play Video

This short video shows you how to create visitor segments in Logaholic. Traffic Segmentation is a great way to isolate groups of visitors, and view web analytics reports for just that group. Segments give you a much better way to analyze the performance of your website. Play Video

Who are your visitors?

Dear web analytics learner, welcome back to the blog. In our last issue we rounded up the 3-step sequel of web analytics for beginners and now we are going to take a closer look at your business and your website’s visitors, and find out how Web Analytics can help you increase your ROI.

In Web Analytics, there are different ways in which you could define your visitors. In my last post I mentioned the segments you can make, which allows you to break down the incoming traffic to your site into manageable groups (segments) by geographic location or referrer.

Just to show you how easy it is to create a segment in Logaholic, I’ve created a little video for you here:

It’s useful to have segments for things like:

• New Visitors
• Customers
• Traffic from important or paid links
• Traffic from important geographic markets

After creating segments for groups of visitors, you’ll have much more insight into your visitors because segmented statistics are much more valuable than a site wide average. Remember the popular adage says: “The average human has one breast and one testicle”… So be careful not to make too many assumption based only on site wide averages.

Customer segmentation and ROI

Knowing who your visitors are comes down to figuring out what they are looking for when coming to your website. For example, creating a segment for visitors from www.shareware.com from USA, and naming it: USA Shareware.com traffic, will help you to find out if advertising on shareware.com pays off. The Overall performance report from the Conversion rates tab is a starting point for measuring your ROI of different segments. In this report, after you have created the above mentioned segment of visitors, you will see exactly how many of them converted and what the overall conversion rate is.

The Sales Funnel

Another great way to evaluate your ROI is by creating a sales funnel report. When setting up the sales funnel, you can insert the cost for a single click of incoming traffic (for example, from shareware.com) to your site and at the bottom, the revenue from a sale. When the sales funnel is generated, it will display the total number of visitors to your site from shareware.com and how much traffic trickles down through the different stages you have defined, what the conversion rate and bounce rate is from stage to stage and finally what the ROI of the funnel is, based on the cost per click and the revenue generated by the target page in last funnel stage.

How to increase ROI

Using the example above, let’s say the reports show that my traffic from shareware.com isn’t converting very well. This tells me that the money I spent on advertising on this site didn’t yield enough sales to justify the cost. A few of them downloaded a trial version of my software, but nobody bought it. Now, it could be that my software sucks, but it could also be that people coming from this site only look for free software. Now that I know it, at least I can slash my advertising on shareware.com and stop wasting money.

Another example: If I make a sales funnel for my Italian visitors from Google, lets say I find out that 5 % of them convert. Compared to a 2% conversation rate of my USA Google visitors. The sales funnel just helped me discover that if I can increase my visitors from Italy or if I create a landing page in Italian for them, I can probably get even more orders from them.

This is one of the many measures you can take to increase efficiency and ROI on any of your online campaign.

To (part 5)

We’ve just updated the files on our site to our latest official release, Logaholic Web Analytics 2.5.

Many little improvements and enhancements make this release even easier to use.

One major change is that the software is now multi-lingual, so you may choose which language you want to see Logaholic in. (Well, just English and Dutch for now, but if you want to help us translate Logaholic into your language, please read this.)

Enhancements to the user interface include:

• Improved menu navigation
  Easier, faster access and more consistency throughout the application. The ‘action menu’ is now available on many more items, so you can jump and drill through your stats like never before.
• Sorting galore
  All report tables now have sortable columns. (We love you jQuery)
• Dynamic helper menus
  While completing forms, you now get a helper menu showing possible input based on your stats, whether it be keywords, pages, referrers or almost anything else.
• Introducing Workspace
  A great improvement that will keep track of the reports you visit and put them all together on one dashboard screen so you can easily compare and analyze multiple reports with multiple settings and segmentation at the same time.
  Trust me, it rocks 🙂

This release is mainly the result of feedback we received over the last few months. Thanks to all the customers who participated in our feedback survey, I hope we have a few new features that you will ‘enjoy’.

Phones, Feeds, Segments and more:

• Mobile Browser Report
  iPhone vs Blackberry. Find out which mobile devices are visiting your site and which ones matter. We’ve also updated overall browser detection.
• Feeds and Feedburner
  RSS/XML Feed urls are now reported separately from pages, and not counted as ‘human’ visitors towards your website visitor stats. Plus, if you use Feedburner, you can also get your Feedburner stats in Logaholic.
• New Graphs and Trends
  More graphs have been added to the Today dashboard, which now has a little widget that enables you to switch quickly between essential graphs. Also, check out the Search Trends report to see the big search engines battle it out.
• Full time zone support
  We’ve extended timezone support in this version. You can now set the reporting and collecting timezones separately for any profile.
• Improved Visitor Segmentation features
  The segmentation system has been significantly improved. It now has full support for negative conditions and is much faster. We hope more people will now be able to discover this powerful feature. (Current users: Segmentation was called ‘Filters’ in previous versions, silly us)
• Default Visitor Segments
  We’ve added some default Segmentation filters to get you started, like: New visitors, Return Visitors and Mobile Visitors. But also examples for creating visitor segments for things like Google Adwords, so you can easily track your marketing campaigns performance.
• Updated Test Center
  The PHP Split Test result report has been enhanced with cool new metrics like the time spent on each page variation and their bounce rates.

For those SPE users out there that are blessed with Terrabyte logs files, tons of profiles and Gigabyte databases; we’re working on an (even) faster database, but that is still in the pipeline. We have added some more maintenance features in the meantime though:

• added command line script to update all profiles in the background
• added command line script to keep database size under a certain threshold of months
• added (beta) support for mysql pack and merge tables (doesn’t work on all tables yet)
• added a new user level that cannot edit the profile at all.
• added 1st party visitor cookie support in SPE style javascript tracking code

You can download Logaholic Web Analytics 2.5 here:

http://www.logaholic.com/wp/trial-download/

Thanks for your help!
Michael