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  • Understanding your website statistics to get more business

    {jcomments off}website statisticsDetailed analysis of the data collected by your website can lead to greater interaction between your business and your customers.

    It is an easy mistake to consider only top level data, such as website hits or visits, and base your entire perception of how well the site is performing on these figures alone.

    If the purpose of the website is to merely to be hit without any tangible benefit to the business, then basing the success of the site on these figures would be adequate. In fact the number of hits could be easily be rocketed upward simply by encouraging visits from bots.

    (A bot, Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet more at wikipedia)more at wikipedia)

    However, whilst some bots are exceedingly beneficial, such as search engine robots, others are intrusive and malicious.

    So we must look at the headline stats again in this context: how many of those website visits were from human beings?

    By erecting screens around the website we can filter out the background noise of bot visits and start to see how actual people interact with the business via the website.

    It then returns to the central question of what the actual purpose of the website is, and what action do you want people to perform when they are there?

    If that is to fill out a form, send an email or make a purchase, then that is easily measurable.

    The site visit information then tells us how many visits we need in order to achieve a desired result.

    Hence it is the conversion of site visits to a particular action that is important, and leads to the question:

    Why did the action not get performed? Was the product / information not what the person wanted, or was it the size shape or colour of a particular button, that caused it not be be pressed?

    What about the viewers geographical location, or the device they viewed the website on?

    All Starwood Systems constructed websites have multiple data collection and screening systems installed.

    These enable us to further screen unwanted traffic out of the equation and also deliver modified information to the viewer based upon any number of criteria to improve the click through rate.

     

  • Working towards making the Internet a safer place.

    Starwood Systems are proud members of Project Honey Pot, a distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots that scrape websites for email addresses.project honeypot logo

    Each day, thousands of robots, crawlers, and spiders troll the web. Website administrators have few resources in order to tell whether a visitor to a site is good or malicious. Project Honey Pot was created in order to provide this information to website administrators in order to help them make informed decisions on who to allow onto their sites.

    The data from Project Honey Pot is collated, processed, and shared with Webmasters to improve security, and law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers.

    We donate multiple MX records to the project and all Starwood Systems websites have Honeypots installed to capture dictionary attackers, comment spammers and other malicious users.

    The invaluable data provided by Project Honey Pot also allows us to filter out unwanted visits to our websites.

    Blocking visits from malicious bots and individuals not only increases security, but also allows us to see a clearer picture of genuine website traffic and conversion statistics.

    You can learn more about Project Honey Pot at their website http://www.projecthoneypot.orghttp://www.projecthoneypot.org