One of the most important things you can do once your business’ website is up and running is to keep track of the visitors that visit the site. About 95% of Our Milwaukee members have websites and hopefully they all have some sort of statistics tracking software installed, as the information it provides can be invaluable.

For example, we know that the Our Milwaukee website had 729 visits in the last month with a huge spike in visitors on Dec. 28th. The spike was tracked to an article on usaweekend.com that linked to OurMilwaukee.net. It was exciting to see that almost 100 people came to check us out that day and about 70 came the day after. Our average is about 20-30 visits a day so we effectively tripled our exposure online over that time. Of course without a stats tracker we would have no idea of what was going on with our site. For a site that is e-commerce based, statistics are even more important and an amazing way to benchmark the success of your ad and marketing campaigns as well as the overall flow of traffic on your website.

Some of the simpler things you’ll find stats on are location of visitors, landing pages, exit pages, time spent on the site, incoming links, click count and keywords that were used to find your site on search engines. All of these things can allow a business owner to become more aware of web trends and allow them to make more solid decisions when tweaking their website for maximum performance and search engine rating.

I use the stats tracking service from Google (Google Analytics) but I am sure there are many other just as effective options out there. If anyone in the OM group needs more information or has any questions about online stats tracking please feel free to contact the website committee using the email address found in our directory in the members only area.

- Posted by: Chuck - Website Committee Chair