What Gets Measured Gets Managed

By: Barry Orlando at Orlando Web Services

Submitted on Wed, Sep 10th, 2008 8:01 am

Do you know where your website traffic comes from?

Do you know what terms your website traffic used to find your site?

Do you know where your website traffic is going on your site?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you don’t know or you don’t care, then you are missing a lot of opportunities.

If all you monitor from your site is how many times the phone rings, or how many people email you a quote request each month and ignore or dismiss the importance of your traffic monitoring, you are like a dog chasing its tail.

There is a cause and effect relationship here. If you walked out to your car and it didn’t start, would you throw the car away? If you are like me you would have an expert inspect your car to find out what’s wrong with it. Yet people never want to have their website inspected to find out what’s wrong. Instead they opt for replacing the site with a new site because the “old one didn’t work”. After the new site is built…and doesn’t work again, every web developer in this persons mind is a rip off artist. Let’s stop this insanity!

When I bring my car to the garage to have it looked at, the first thing they are going to do is inspect my car. They will go through the most likely causes as to why my car isn’t starting and make sure that each one of these is resolved. If that doesn’t solve the problem they will look deeper for a cause. Baring any huge obstacle the car will eventually start and will not have to be thrown away. The same is true for your website…

Baring any huge obstacle the website can be made to work and will not have to be thrown away.

Since we are talking about traffic to the site, we can monitor the traffic to find out who is coming or going and determine if it’s running as expected. Using various types of software we will be able to see the search terms used, the search engines used, and details as to where your traffic is going and what it is doing. We now have numbers in which to measure whether the site is reaching its expected benchmarks. What Gets Measured Gets Managed!

From the results, we can create a to-do list of fixes that need to be made to the site to improve its performance. We can change page titles, copy and other elements to improve how the site is found in search engines, and even submit it to more search engines if not enough of them have found the site.

You can modify product information so that it more closely matches our traffics expectation, something as little as a correct model number can work wonders to improve traffic.

If you do not have the time to do these things, bring in a mechanic. When it comes to my car that’s what I do. I don’t have time to perform engine repair and I sure don’t have the equipment to do so properly. I might know a lot if technical “stuff” but when it comes to cars I only know the basics and therefore I am willing to pay someone to do it for me.

Who can be your “website mechanic”? Start with your current web developer. If you don’t have them anymore, ask other business owners who they use and what their traffic reports look like.

About the Author

Barry Orlando
Orlando Web Services

Barry J. Orlando - Owner With an Internet career that began at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1994, Barry has been working as a professional Internet consultant for the past fourteen years. His diverse skill-set has put him in high demand in areas such as Web Development, Internet Marketing, Client Relations, and System Administration. As an Internet consultant, he has helped hundreds of small to mid-sized businesses increase their online revenue through active participation in his proven process. This process has empowered many of his clients to succeed through their own efforts.