understanding a web report

what does a web trends report really tell you about your site

[Tracy]

I'm new to analyzing a web trends reports. I just have the basic package. Can anyone give advice as to what the 'trends' are I should be looking at?

[cornwall]

You could take a look at

[webmasterworld.com...]

which delves into what you can and cannot glean from the absolute figures

"Trends" is much more what WebTrends gives you, rather than absolutes.

It will show you over time how traffic has altered - a doubling of WT figures is generally a doubling of traffic. It also shows you which are the important referral sites, which pages browsers arrive at and leave at, how search engines change in importance over time, and so on

It really depends on what business you are in, as to which of these is important to you. For instance on referral sites, you can set it to as many or as few as you want. I deal in hotel sites, and really only the top 10 referrers are delivering any volume, but it is important to know what keywors are used to find a site (you can tweek them on your site to then improve it)and I go into that in some depth.

[jimnovo]

Tracy,

Assuming you are using WebTrends Log Analyzer or Live, and you can customize your reporting...

I find it most helpful to identify "actions" you want people to take on your site - add product to cart, sign up for newsletter, download a file - and look at the percentage of visits resulting in these actions.

Then try to make changes to global navigation / design to see if you can increase these "conversion ratios". Just look at whatever area of the reports covers actions you are interested in and divide the number of actions by visits; track this percentage over time.

If there is no reporting on the items you need to track, you can always use a 1x1 pixel on the page and track pulls of this image under Ad Views, it can also track .cgi calls.

Once you gain some experience with this, the next level would be to use Filters to look at *specific kinds of traffic* (from a certain search engine or ad) and track the same completion ratios. This is the beginning of optimizing your marketing spend for highest payback.

If you use specific landing pages for all your ads, these become "Entry Pages" in WebTrends speak. Filter by these Entry Pages to isolate traffic from a specific source and compare your conversion ratios by source to see where your money is best spent.

Jim Novo

[graywolf]

You can also use the "most common paths" and start it with your basket and checkout pages. Gives you an idea why/where people are bailing out.