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How important are
website Stats?
On November 23 2013, Godaddy
is removing the free website stats from their hosting plans.
This is the most surprising
information and development with one of our biggest competitors.
Since knowing where your website traffic is coming from is about
the most important feature of a website, we are amazed that
Godaddy had announced that they are discontinuing the stats for
their hosting customers.
It is how we know what
keywords are being searched for, how we know what ads are working
and how many people are coming to our websites. We need to know
which pages are popular and which are not.
Website statistics are
at the core of the entire website. Without that information it is
impossible to manage a website.
I can't even imagine why
Godaddy would remove one of the core features for their website
hosting customers.
I also want to point out they
are calling if "FREE" probably to
justify removing it. It is not free, it is part of what people
are paying for with their monthly hosting. You can't charge for a
service and then call each component of the service FREE. If that
is the case, why is anyone paying for a bunch of free services?
Then again as a competitor, I
do understand the decision.
They have tried to compete
with all the cut rate hosting services offering unlimited plans
for pennies a month and that means overloaded servers and
websites that are constantly unavailable.
To solve the problem I believe
they are trimming the fat. Trimming programs that are server CPU
heavy and Hard drive heavy.
Statistic programs are one of
the biggest resource hogs, logging every page access, every image
access and costing as much CPU time as the actual page accesses
themselves. With more people building pages with more and more
files as broadband allows for even more, data servers and hard
drives are getting pounded with reads and writes. With cheap
servers that means more downtime, drive failures and maintenance
costs.
When you are trying to give
customers unlimited everything for under $10 it can cost more to
provide the service than you charge, so corners need to be cut.
Just like in all cases, you get what you pay for.
But wait, there is a
reason we log those things. And that is because they are
important.
If you can't tell how many
people came to your website or why they came to your website then
how do you manage your content? How do you tweak the SEO when you
have no data available.
Their solution is
to use other companies like Google Analytics for the service.
We have already told you why using google for stats is a bad idea. And here is a company that knows
better than anyone, telling you to do just that.
What is their next step,
tell you to use google for website hosting?
Maybe instead of using
their website tonight CMS you should use pageBuzz and then
transfer the pages over to Godaddy?
Or maybe just use web.com for you website and send Godaddy a few dollars
for allowing them to suggest it.
None of it makes much sense.
I am shocked to see a company
the size of Godaddy stop providing such a vital service as part
of each website.
I have never heard of anyone
referring their own customers to outside vendors to get services
that should be provided with website hosting. I might believe
smaller services doing this because they can't offer the vast
resources that Godaddy can, but never from one if not the top
website hosting provider in the world.
At pageBuzz we have added to
out website stats, we have increased their ability and have added
graphs, and more importantly we have added search engine
placement.
The stats and pageBuzz will
actually show what keywords people are searching for and what
page of the search engines you are appearing for which keyword
searches.
We have daily reports, monthly
reports and even a 6 month report so users can watch trends and
manage traffic levels.
Why website stats can't
be ignored:
Indicates
Traffic Levels
Helps Track
Advertising Success / Failures
Shows Product
Popularity
Finding Most
Viewed Pages
Helps
Understand Customer Acquisition Costs
Indicates Traffic
Levels
The most important part about
website stats is they show us traffic levels. How many people are
coming to the website, 100 or 1,000,000. How do you know without
website tracking?
The issue is not only your
need to know, it is important to know so that you can manage
resources. If you have 1,000,000 visitors every day, you may need
more capacity. You can't plan for growth, manage traffic if you
don't know how much traffic you have.
How do you know if the website
is even working? You build a website, then have no indicator on
how many people actually are getting to it. That sounds like a
very bad plan.
Helps Track
Advertising Success / Failures
If you don't have website
stats and you run an advertising campaign to get people to your
website how do you know if it worked? You don't know how many
people even showed up.
You need stats to compare
visitors with sales. Compare how may people used the checkout and
never purchased.
I can't even imagine anyone
that would not have their eyes glued to the stats when they are
spending money on ads.
Even if you place free ads on
craigslist or other sites, you need to know if anyone clicked on
them.
Website referrals show where
people came from, what other websites are linking to you and what
people are saying about you. Are the referring sites saying you
suck, or this place is great? Without knowing the pages that
refer visitors to your website, you just don't know.
Shows Product
Popularity
If you have sales, you know
which products are selling. But what about knowing if products
are just not being found?
Just because you only sell
some core products does not mean you can't sell other products
but maybe nobody is finding them.
If you have website stats then
you can see if people are finding your products in the search
engine and not buying them maybe you need to get rid of that line,
change the price or make changes to how you present it.
If the products are not even
being seen, then you can make them more visible, move location or
feature them on more popular pages.
Finding The Most
Viewed Pages
It is important to know which
pages are the most viewed. This gives you the ability to feature
products, run ads or specials on those pages.
If you assume that the home
page is the most viewed you are probably wrong. Locating the
pages with the most traffic are vital to getting the right
content in front of visitors.
If you sell products and
people are only finding your website for a blog post you wrote
about taking your kids to a local fair then you want to make sure
you take advantage of that and add content that promotes your
main business.
If you don't know who or when
people come to your website, you just can't do any of that.
Helps Understand
Customer Acquisition Costs
When it comes to advertising,
you need to know, what it costs to get people to your website and
what percentage of those become customers.
Does it cost you $1, $10 or $100.
If you advertise and spent $100 and get 10 sales, that is great.
But did 1000 people visit the website and only 10 purchased or
did 10 people visit the website and 10 purchased.
The answers are very different,
one is 0.01:1 conversion ratio the other is 1:1 conversion ratio.
In order to manage any type of
ad campaign and determine if it was cost effective you need data.
If you had
1000 visitors some may come back later and buy.
If you have 10
visitors, you tapped out the use of the traffic.
You just can't run a
business with a blindfold on.
Business owners more than
anyone else need to monitor their business and there is just no
way to do that without website stats.
I am not sure why Godaddy
decided that the customers can live without it, but I know our
customers cannot and will never have to worry about that.
We will continue to provide
services like stats and continue to add new features, programs and tools to
our hosting platform wile companies
like Godaddy have taken away the free email and now website stats
in just a few months.
To us, that seems like they
are going backwards.
I do understand phasing out
things that are not popular or productive. We have phased out
programs like our online auction, web ring, polling programs and
other tools that were not being used. That is just part of doing
business.
But we remove features that
are not being used and allow anyone using them to continue. We
would never just eliminate something so critical for every user
on the entire system.
Don't Worry Godaddy
Customers they have a Solution
Godaddy is telling their
customers to used 3 party solutions for their website stats.
Unfortunately, doing that is not effective, does not give the
data that the website can and will be very limited in scope.
The can't reference page urls
with inventory and show which products have traffic, just pages.
They don't have access to the server logs, only the data derived
from a single access per page. So they can never offer what the
actual website can offer.
Plus, you have to add
the code between the <head> and </head> tags of each
page on your website according to the Godaddy help page.
If you have a template that is
not too bad, if you have 200 pages, have fun editing. Also, 90%
of the users have no clue how to edit html using a text editor.
What happened to all
the commercials that say, just click here and POW! A Website
Tonight! What happened to how simple it is, anyone can do it?
Now people need to learn complex coding to see how many
visitors they have on their website?
It seems this time
Godaddy has made a big mistake and it will cost their customers
dearly. I am sure they have good reasons for doing this and I am
sure they have though about it long an hard. I
hope they are right because we like them and use them for
services like domain registrations on a regular basis.
But from here, it does
not look like the right decision and I think many people will
leave when the realize they can't track visitors on their
websites.
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