I have been to few presentations lately and some things disturb me. The poor use or lack of understanding of numbers.

Online marketing is all about numbers (not unlike any business really)

The difference about online as its really easy to count :)

If you know you can get 100 people to your web site and one of those takes an action, (a sale, join a database, or contacts you) then all you have to is 2 things:

1. Increase the amount of visitors

2. Increase the amount who take action

But before you even start improving the results, you have to at least have accurate numbers to start with. Makes sense right?

One presentation I went to, was with a web development company, who showed a picture of basic, server installed stats program.

Now I know they were inaccurate, but he prompted me to actually find out!

So I pulled up a site I hadn’t been working on, I knew the traffic was almost zero, but I had also added a second counting tool.

Lets look at some numbers. First, basic server install stats program, that most web hosts use- Awstats:

As you can see it shows around 5-600 visitors a month –  a reasonable amount for a site I had done nothing towards getting more visitors.

At the same time, I have used another counter (also free) – statcounter:

You see from the graph, the most visitors, I EVER had  was 80 per month!

The difference between the 2 numbers was almost 10 times!

(Keep in mind I have seen Awstats Images have been used in many selling traffic generation programs)

So before you look at getting more traffic to your site- know your numbers. Here are some tools that help:

1. Statcounter.com- A free fast and invisible counter- very simple and can be set up to email your satts every week.

2. Google Analytics- (www.google.com/analytics/ ) The do everything,  power package - also free but does take some learning. Highly recommended if you sell anything online, as it can be set up so that its tracks actions all the way to sale.

So here is the main point, before you go to improve anything, you have to have a benchmark a place to start and accurate numbers are a good starting point!

All the best

Paul Easton

PS: If you are in New Zealand I am running a free seminar on to get to the top of Google.

I hold nothing back and I explain it in non “Geek” terms.

Event details are here:

http://www.InternetMarketingNZ.com/

Limited to 50 seats only and includes a bonus CD ($97.00 value)