Tracking your site visitor statistics by Mark Nunney, 15 August 2007

Use site statistics analysis software to monitor your site’s visitors, referrers, sales and other ‘wanted actions’ like newsletter sign-ups etc.

Here’s a grab from the home page dashboard of the free Google Analytics reporting for a real site - thinkingmanagers.com:

In the following image, Google Analytics gives us a simple overview of different traffic sources:

Below we see the first ten of a list of over 37,000 keywords searched with to reach the thinkingmanagers.com in one four week period:

Below is the same report filtered to show only those keywords searched with that contain the words ‘management style’ (the ‘management style’ keyword niche):

Reports like that allow you to study the behavior of different groups of visitors and find the ones that spend the most money or are more likely to become leads, etc. For example, in the above grab we see a Goal Conversion Rate of 1.91% for those searching with keywords containing ‘management style’ (the ‘management style’ keyword niche).

This ability to study keyword niche behavior is central to keyword research and developing your SEO strategy.