Web Affiliate Marketing Blog

Web stats are a boring part of Affiliate Marketing, almost as bad as link building, but are essential if you’re to tweak and improve the performance of a website and see if your visitors are behaving in the way you think/expect.

I’ve always found that most tools out there, either confuse the hell out of me, or show me too much information meaning I never pay much attention to them. For some of my sites, I’ve no idea how people are finding me, what keywords they’re using, and where they are clicking out to. A few months ago however, I stumbled across Piwik, a downloadable, open source, real time web analytics software program which I implented across a few of my website such as The Outdoors.

Piwik provides detailed reports on your website visitors and from the dashboard you can see which search engines and keywords they used, where they came from, length of their visit etc. Drilling further down for that Stato’s amongst us, you can find out langauge, browser types, popular pages, bounce rates, returning visitors and much more. I guess it’s very much like Google Analytics, but a little easier and quicker to navigate. On the plus side, this provides REAL TIME info so no having to wait for Google to gets it’s arse into gear!

To have Piwik provide a quick overview of all your websites in one place, it requires nothing more than adding a single piece of code to your website footers.

There’s also a free iPhone and Android applications meaning you can monitor your sites and show off all those lovely stats whilst out and about with your friends… if that’s the type of thing that floats your boat!