Anyone with a website knows it’s important to have access to website metrics. You need to know how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and what they are doing on your site.

So I am sure you already have one of the many web analytics tools in place, even if it’s only Google Analytics.

But let’s be honest, how often do you really check your site metrics?

My guess is; not too often. In fact, our data suggests most people don’t view website traffic reports more than once a month.

The problem with that is that one day, even if you have the best analytics tools, you’ll open up your reports and be like this:

Now, I’m not suggesting you dwell on all your site metrics every day, because for most of the numbers once a month is fine.

But there are a few you should be monitoring closely. These website metrics can reveal disaster or fortune. Left unchecked they can cost you dearly when traffic patterns suddenly change.

You don’t want to find out your traffic collapsed 3 weeks ago or that Google has banned your site! Likewise, it might be nice to know you made the front page of Reddit and there is smoke coming out of your server!

So here goes, my choice of essential website metrics to check each day:

1. Visitors and pageviews

This one should speak for its self. Monitoring the daily number of unique visitors and pageviews is an easy way to check if your site is performing as expected. Any large dips or spikes will be easy to spot and allow you to investigate further.

2. Conversion rates

Visitors and pageviews tell you something about the quantity of your website traffic. Your conversion rates will tell you something about the quality of that traffic.

Of course you shouldn’t just measure conversion to your sales confirmation page. You should also measure it for things like newsletter sign ups, contact forms and key pages involved in your customer’s journey.

So make sure you have your conversion tracking set up. Its called Goal Url’s in Google Analytics, Logaholic calls it Key Performance Indicators.

If you haven’t done so already, set it up now! Because you will want to know if your website traffic is converting the way it should on a daily basis.

3. Top Pages

Make sure to include a top 10 or top 20 pages report in your daily review. You want to keep tabs on what the most popular content on your site is. If one of your pages suddenly gets a lot of traffic, you want to catch that in time so you can make any changes or improvements to that page while it’s hot.

4. Top Referrers

Like pages, you want to know where your traffic is coming from so you can respond when needed.

5. Bounce Rate

A “Bounced visitor” is a user that accessed only one page on your site and then left. In general, large changes to your daily bounce rate mean something fishy is going on and it’s time to take action.

Other website metrics

These 5 site metrics are available in most web analytics tools, but there are many more website metrics. You can find a list of web analytics definitions here.

Get your daily dose automatically

Logaholic makes it very easy to organize these reports in a dashboard so you can always access your website metrics quickly.

Also, Logaholic allows you to set up daily emails with your own choice of reports. You won’t even have to go log in to your reporting system, they automatically land in your inbox every day.

Believe it or not Social Media Sharing buttons on your site may decrease your page conversion.

In this article you can read how this bold statement is substantiated.

Where it boils down to is fairly obvious, 2 main reason for conversion decrease;

1. Social proof is back firing; the sharing buttons often contain a zero or low number which suggests that the buttons are (hardly) shared and therefore not interesting.
2. Sharing buttons distract potential customers, you must have them focused on 1 button only; Right you’ve guessed it, the buying button.

A customer of VisualWebsiteOptimizer has done the math and increased site conversion with 11% after the sharing buttons had been removed.

Through A/B testing (a premium report option in Logaholic) a conclusive test was run.

Read here in detail how they did it, with the A/B testing module of Logaholic the test can easily be duplicated, we are curious to hear if you also managed to increase conversion numbers by removing sharing buttons.

Want to know more on Logaholic A/B testing module, just click here to go to the Report Store and when you are already using A / B testing  but still could do with some technical support read here how A/B testing is setup/configured in Logaholic, ofcourse you can always contact us.

Today’s blogpost is ‘for advertisers only’.

If you use Google Adwords or any another Pay Per Click solution – if you advertise in ANY way, please read this blog because it contains information that can save you a lot of money every single day.

If you are like us, money is in limited supply 😉 But, we have to spend money to make money so that is why we advertise. If we do things right, we make more than we spend.

Nevertheless, we all accept there is a great amount of ‘waste’ in all our advertising that we can’t quite put our finger on. Even online, where we should be able to track just about everything, we are sometimes being denied essential information needed to spend our money effectively.

One of the big advantages of Logaholic is that you are no longer dependent on what others tell you your statistics are. You can check their numbers against your own – and then some. In fact, you can use Logaholic to ruthlessly slash ineffective advertising. Below you will find out how.

If you’re new to our Web Analytics software, Welcome! You can download a free self-hosted edition here or you may subscribe to our 30-day Logaholic Live Trial (no installation required).

Keyword Based Advertising

Be on the lookout for keywords that you are paying for. Find the keywords that are bringing in a lot of visitors but have a low (if any) conversion rate. You can do this for different target files (Key Performance Indicators) to get a more complete picture.

Open your Logaholic and go to the Keyword Conversion (Premium) report. Choose at least a 3 month date range and an important target page. It is also recommended to use a segmentation filter here. With a segmentation filter for your specific ad system (usually Adwords) you will be able to see only the keywords that you’ve paid for. Logaholic includes a segmentation filter for Google Adwords by default, if you are using another ad system, please find here how to set up a new segmentation filter.

Make a list of the worst keywords and simply remove them from your adwords account – or other ad system. You have just saved money and you can be sure it will not impact your sales.

You can remove any paid keywords that do not convert, unless you have another reason for advertising on it. Perhaps you want your product to be found on a certain keyword for branding or positioning purposes, even though it doesn’t convert. That’s fine of course. But keywords that serve no specific purpose and don’t convert are just draining your ad budget – get rid of them.

Google’s conversion tracking that comes with Adwords will allow you to do something similar, but with two important differences:

1. Logaholic allows you to choose and compare any conversion target page, so you can evaluate conversion on different levels in your sales funnel.

2. Correct us if we’re wrong – but in our experience Logaholic seems to pick up a whole lot more conversions than Google’s javascript based solution. More accurate statistics mean much better decisions in this case.

Other Advertising
The process is the same as above, but this time look at the “Referrer Conversion” report (Premium) in Logaholic.

No matter where or how you advertise, clicks from a website to your site will leave a referrer. Simply find the referring sites that you advertise on to see the conversion rates.

Again, find sites that bring in a lot of traffic, but no conversions. You will want to stop advertising on these sites.

Regards,
The Logaholic Team

P.S. Invest Wisely.
We started this article by telling you that you could slash advertising cost and save money. What’s even more interesting is this: Invest the money you save back into the advertising that DOES work. This way you don’t
save costs, but you make much more money with the same expense!

Use Logaholic to boost your site’s Performance

Today, we want to share with you a method that we have used ourselves to double our traffic and sales. If this method will work for you we don’t know. But it is very simple and worth a try. In a nutshell it comes down to this: duplicate what already works.

Step 1: Find out which referring sites are most valuable
Step 2: Investigate the referring site.
Step 3: Find 5 sites that are just like the referrer
Step 4: Try to get a link on these new sites

When you’ve already had some time to check out Logaholic, you might be familiar with our Conversion Reports. They are indispensable when you want to boost your online sales. In order to measure conversion, all Logaholic Conversion Reports require Target pages (KPI’s), for which a configuration manual can be found here.

If you’re new to our Web Analytics software, Welcome! You can download a free self-hosted edition here or you could subscribe to our 30-day Logaholic Live Trial (no installation required).

Step 1: Find out which referring sites are most valuable.

The best way yo do this is with the “Referrer Conversion” report (Premium). Select the appropriate target file (your ‘Key Performance Indicator’) and choose a date range. You can find You may want to make the date range quite big, say 3 months, to get an accurate picture of the Referrer conversion rates over time.

When the result appears, sort the table by the Converted Visitors column to see which site sent you the most customers. Observe the conversion rates for each site. If you have multiple target files, you may want to run this report for each one and compare the results.

Now, if most of your traffic is from Google, that is going to be hard to duplicate. You can try working on Yahoo and MSN and try get more search traffic from there.

More interesting are other sites that link to you, either through advertising or a natural link. Note down the top 5 sites (or whatever number you want) that sent you the most customers with the highest converting traffic.

Step 2: Investigate the referring site.

Next, visit those top sites and try to find your link. See if you can find a way to improve it’s exposure on the site. You can contact the webmaster thanking them for the link to get a conversation going if you don’t already have contact with these sites. The point is that you already know this site sends you quality traffic, so you want to try to get them to send you as much traffic as possible.

While you visit these sites, note down a few keywords you think this site should be found on in google. Or, check the page source to see the META keywords they are using.

Once you’ve done that for your top converting link partners, it’s time to duplicate it.

Step 3: Find 5 sites that are just like the referrer.

For each top converting site, try to find 5 website that are essentially the same. Most of the time, whatever site is linking to you – there are more sites like it out there. They may not be as good and they may not have as much traffic to send you, but they will still have some.

You may even hit the jackpot and find out that an unpopular site is sending you a little bit of good traffic and that there is a similar site that can send you great traffic, and lots more of it.

Use the keywords you collected from Step 2 and do some searches on google. Check out the top results to see if there are any other sites that could link to you.

Step 4: Try to get a link on these new sites.

Once you have made a list of potential link partners, it’s time to contact them – personally. Don’t use a template, don’t use a standard text. Send them a real personal email and simply ask for the link.

You are in a great position to do so, because you can say “site thisandthat.com” also links to you. Since they operate in the same space, chances are they know about this site.

Of course, there may be something expected in return, money, a link or whatever the situation is your case. But Logaholic has given you a sense of the return you could expect – you’re in a good position to negotiate.

Depending on what you find and how successful you are at extending your links onto these new sites, this strategy can make a huge difference in your traffic and sales levels.

Beware of ‘link building’ software. They can be effective, but they are very time consuming and expensive. Using the information you get from Logaholic, you are targeting link partners with laser precision and it will take you much less time to actually get some new links!

The best part is, after a while, you can do it all over again.

That’s it. Very simple and you could start doing this today!

Here’s to your success !

Kind Regards,
The Logaholic Team

See also:
The future does not equal the past
Boost the amount of traffic on your site

In this blogpost we will be talking about how you can use Logaholic to optimize your content
and boost the traffic on your website.

You might already have taken a look at our Visitors Duration report. Is your website able to retain the interest of your visitors? Or are they leaving your site within seconds after arrival? Usually, you will see that the majority of your visitors will not visit longer than 60 seconds. The ultimate goal is of course, to lengthen the time spend on your website.

Site errors are often the cause of lost visitors and short visiting times. It is therefore of paramount importance that you minimize the faults in your website. Logaholic can help you identify errors.
We developed a 4 step approach for you.

Step 1: Open the Logaholic Error report from the popular content section.

Step 2: Take a look at the identified errors. Click on a error to request the specific urls. One of the most common site errors is the ‘404-Not Found’. This indicates that a page does not exist anymore or that the link has changed.

Step 3: Remove non-active links on your pages, and if needed take additional measures.

Step 4: Monitor the results in Logaholic (after a short while).

Next to erasing errors, there are several ways to improve the content on your site in order to retain visitors. For example, our Click Trails report (Premium) helps you investigate the way visitors navigate through your website. Using the Click Trail reports you can drill down to individual visitors and see the exact path that visitor took though your website.

Another report we strongly recommend is called Page Analysis (Premium). This report shows not only the incoming links for a page, and also shows where people go from there. A great feature of Page Analysis is ‘Visual Mode’ that displays click-through statistics right on your webpage. Give it a try!

Good luck and Regards,
The Logaholic Team

See also:
The future does not equal the past