October 18, 2006.
So, yesterday we had a big spike on our website, in fact it went up Monday and continued to go up on Tuesday. Today we are going back down. We had 12% of visitors to our site from Lafayette, California, and 34% were returning visitors from all over the United States. In other parts of the world they are viewing our site also, London, Buenos Aires, Singapore and even Dubai! Last week we had a record Monday with our biggest day ever of views to pages and almost all were new visitors, it was 3 times the average amount of viewers to our site.
So...how do I know this? And if you have a company website YOU should know this too....
It's called Web Analytics, and there are many companies that do this...it's basically tracking activity and performance on your website. Analytics measures whatever you want it to measure, effectiveness of a marketing campaign, measures traffic to a website, measures activity of a shopper - it's Big Brother for sure!
We use a free product from google (www.googleanalytics.com), and it gives us a glimpse at what our customer is doing. Now, don't get me wrong I don't know exactly where they live, I don't know who they are, and I don't know what they are looking at. And I believe it can be skewed....what if one person in Malaysia (not likely) looks at my site 45 times a day? I am told it should be cookied and they will look at each user as a different visitor.
So, back to why the spike? Our angel ornament was featured in Country Living's Holiday Gift Guide, however it hit newsstands back East over two weeks ago. So, who knows? We do not have a marketing campaign that we have been wanting to track, or an advertisement in a magazine. We do PR and that is all we do.
Maybe some day I will be able to see you Jane Smith at 456 Elm Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan, looking at those Snowman ornaments over and over, and over again, tracking you as you explore our website.
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