Associated with the gathering of information and statistics is the ongoing reporting to the customer of what is going on with their web presence, who is using the web site, why, for how long and what do they look at?

The nature of the reporting is of course directly associated with what the web site is for and how it is targeted at the potential user.

Follows are a series of examples of the type of information that could be passed to the customer and why and how they might use it. They are also constrained by the type of information that a web statistics package can generate - see 'Site Statistics'

Volume Statistics

How do people find the web site - do they come directly or through search engines? Has there been a month on month change, how important is search engine presence, has recent work yielded any benefits in terms of volume of visitors?

Keeping decent stats can also allow the filtering of changes due to say Christmas and August holidays and real dips or peaks due to your web presence. Customers also like to see ongoing improvements.

Key words or search terms used to find the web site

I supply a monthly list in order of most popular terms used. This tells both me and the customer what search terms really bring the customer to the web site - not what I would like to think works!

Entry Pages

The home page is not necessarily the page that customers use to initially access the web site. On the web sites I manage, this ranges from 15% to 45% who access the site via the home page.

These most popular entry pages, matched to the search terms used to find them identify the pages I and the customer must watch carefully - these pages give the 1st impressions of the web site and either retain the customers interest or lose them.

Viewed pages

These are the pages that hold the information that the customer expects to find - this is where they navigate to, not necessarily where the information resides - knowing the former means we can review and if necessary address the latter! It is important that the customer knows this and is encouraged to make or otherwise facilitate changes as necessary.Example: I have an online shop, I know what products people are looking for when they find my web site, I know what pages (products) they navigate to and I know what they actually buy! By using the stats I can tell what I should be selling rather than just what I am selling - perhaps my marketing can be improved or my prices?

Site Search

Associated with viewed pages we can analyse the results of statistics generated by the site search routine. What products or services or information wa sthe customer really looking for - the site search results can be more relevant than the search engine keywords as you get to see the keywords used, not just those that found the web site!

Other statistics that the customer might find interesting are:

The status of their competitors and how they are likely to compare in terms of web site use. Obviously apart from telephoning and asking an opposite number - if one exists, it is necessary to do some detective work.

Find out from the customer who their main competitors are and review their web sites.

• Is the web site any good
• Does it use frames?
• What is the page rank
• Where is it listed on the search engines for competing search terms - and how many search terms!
• Use web tools to see how many times that company is searched for by name - overture and adwords.
• Do they have any site stats java script built in?
• When was the site last changed

As a rule of thumb within the services sector that I support, I use Number of searches for company * 2 + likely visits due to search engine positioning.

Screen sizes and resolutions used by web site visitors. These stats are generally available on a global scale, however if you are dealing with consumer or business , your own stats might be more relevant. gnereally speaking I follow the screen sizes to which the www.bbc.co.uk aim their web sites which is at the time of writing 800*600 though the tendency towards higher resolutions is increasing.

With all the above, the actions of the web site user of customer being fed through to the web site owner allows them to develop a clearer picture of how effective their site is - also based on the web managers views and recommendations.

It doesn't mean remedial action will be taken wher that action i srequired, it does however mean that - in the nicest posiible way - the web manager can go to their client and identify the cause - your web site is out of date - with the effect - nobody wants to contact you!