Okay, you've built a terrific website. You're convinced that it's attractive, informative, and user-friendly. The question, however, is whether other people think so too.
And how do find that out? Elementary, my dear Watson! All you need to do is snoop around for information such as the following:
- How many people visited your website in a given period?
- Which search engines or directories did they use to arrive there?
- Which keywords did they type into search engines to find your website?
- How long did people stay on your website once they got there?
- Which pages did they visit the most?
- Which pages appeared to drive visitors away?
- What kind of computers and browsers did your visitors use?
- Did your online advertising campaigns generate enough traffic to justify the expense?
Once you find answers to these questions, you can put two and two together and take an educated guess at the ultimate question: Does my website fulfill its objectives?
To help you find answers to these questions easily, Office Live Small Business automatically embeds a little chunk of JavaScript on each of your web pages. The script sends back the dirt on every page request that your website gets, such as the IP address of the visitor's computer, the name of the page that they requested, and the brand and version of their browser. Office Live Small Business stores all of these details in a database.
A set of reports, called Reports, then extracts this information from the database on Office Live Small Business's servers on demand, compiles it logically, and presents it as easy-to-understand charts and tables that you can make sense of easily.
Note
Tools, such as Reports, which gather and analyze a website's visitor statistics are called web analytics packages. The most well-known web analytics package, perhaps, is Google Analytics.
To access Reports, sign in to your Office Live Small Business account, if you haven't done so already, and go to Page Manager. Click on the Reports link in the left navigation bar. The Reports dashboard page appears. It displays a few metrics graphically. You'll see several links in the left navigation bar of the dashboard. Each of them will lead you to a report.