Website Stats (aka Analytics)

Marketing to brides, especially online, is much more sophisticated than just 12 months ago. Without regularly reviewing your web analytics, and knowing what they say, the success of any online marketing strategy is quickly and adversely impacted. And if you think you're getting good or great results from your website now, and as a result think "I don't need to look at my analytics" then... here's some news: YOU'RE WASTING A TON OF MONEY.

Most of the Wedding Professionals I speak with don't know how to get to their website stats. Yes, you read that right. Most don't know HOW to get to their website stats. "My webmaster never gave me that information" is the answer I get to "have you looked at your analytics lately?"

Usually, if they DO know how, they take one look and they get dizzy and never look again. Actually, that part I can understand.

But reviewing your website stats, or "analytics" (i.e. all the data about your website, visitors, and advertising campaigns), is very important.

Analytics tell you things like:

How many people visited your website (for any given period of time)
How they found it
How they are using it
Are they going where you want them to go
Are there pages not loading properly
Where your traffic is coming from
If Google is crawling your website regularly
How many pages are they looking at (before they leave)
If they're finding your inquiry form

.... and a lot more.

So, what do you do? The answer is easy. Either dive in or get someone to do it for you. A professional who monitors and reports your website activity on a monthly basis will give you information that is worth gold. If you pay a professional to review your stats, provide a report with recommendations, on a monthly basis, and pay them $75-$150 - you'll find it an investment that has a very good return-on-investment.


Chris Jaeger
Book More Weddings
http://www.bookmoreweddings.com

Counting Hits Is A Waste of Time

Webmaster: We had 5,000 hits last month!

Site Owner: Wow, that's great. I wonder why we didn't get any inquiries or book any weddings?

"Hits" is a term casually thrown around and creates confusion implying that hits are real people.

Hits are not real people.

They are not real brides and grooms and hits can't make inquiries or buy your products and services. So, for all intents and purposes, hits are useless.

A hit is a technical term that describes the processing activity of your hosting server. If you have a web page with ten images on it, a bride visiting that page will create 11 hits: one when the page is requested and one for each image. As you can see, and this is just one page, one visitor can create a lot of hits very fast.

Hits are created when images are loaded, when scripts are loaded, when the page code is loaded, and when a variety of other services are provided by your hosting server.

If your webmaster talks about hits, ask them do they mean visitor sessions. Ask them if they mean real people. Webmasters love talking about hits because it's always a number higher than visitor sessions - and that mistakenly implies your traffic is better than it actually is.

What You Should Do: Change your mindset and think "visitor sessions" and not hits. If you're webmaster doesnt know the difference, it's time to find a new webmaster. Don't be concerned with the total hits, a number that is found in your website statistics. Instead, monitor and track visitor sessions and unique visitor sessions. These are real brides and grooms and what you should be concerned with.

Chris Jaeger
Book More Weddings
Marketing To Brides
http://www.bookmoreweddings.com