June is practically over and I decided to share some of YowTRIP’s web analytics here. Be able to track who visits your website, how they get to it and what they’re looking for is very important for improving its user experience and marketing effort. That’s why I started I-stats back in 2004 (actually, I started it out of curiosity about who was visiting my personal website).

This month, YowTRIP was visited by people from 94 countries and from 141 countries total so far. This month, the USA led with 58% followed by the UK (7%), Canada (6%), and India (4%).

However, in our total count, Spain holds11% of the visitors, but this month on 3% of the visitors were from Spain. (Perhaps a Spanish version of the site would keep the trend growing? - In the plans…)

One of the most important feature of I-stats is the ability to create Ideal Paths, these are the navigation paths you want your user to take and then you can analyse it and figure out what needs to change on your website to accomplish this. The nice thing is that everything is built real-time, so you don’t have to have the ideal path analysis created before I-stats starts gathering the data…

One of my Ideal Path Analysis look like this: Home Page => Join YowTRIP => Welcome to YowTRIP

From that, I-stats builds the following graph, which has A LOT OF information! For example, you can see that 60% of the people leave the site from the Home Page, which is not good. But the overall average number is 64%, so we see a small improvement. Also, only 1.5% go from the Home Page to “Join YowTRIP”, which is understandable… I’d imagine they want to learn more about it before deciding to join it. Out of the people who do get to the Join page, 31% ended up signing up, 25% went to another page (to find out more information) and 43% left the site. In this case, the overall average percentage of people who are leaving the site at this point is 23%, so this month was higher than the average.

But actually, about 40% of the people who end up signing up, do it from the Join YowTRIP form on the city pages, which show us the importance of having enough content on those pages and that they show up on organic Google search results.

If you search for “Travel Companion in … ” any major city/country, you should see YowTRIP on the first page. It can’t get better than this!

Another important piece of information is the Popular Pages… I group them by segments and check out which ones are the most popular and if they need to be reworked. For the marketing pages: Home, Join, Demo, Search, Blog. The overall average is Home, Demo, Join, Search, About. So, we can see our blog has become more popular… For the city pages: New York City, Paris, Toronto, Rome, Mumbai. The overall average is New York City, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Las Vegas.

Our Marketing Analysis is the most important section that I track very closely. 56% of our visitors came from other links: News coverage, blogs and other posts. And about 52% of those came from CoolSiteOfTheDay.com (yes, we were the cool site of the day on June 5th). 25% of our visitors are returning visitors and they typed in the URL directly, and 18% from search engines.

Of course it’s always fun to see the keywords people searched to find our site… The interesting ones this months: “go to Rome live as roman”, “cook and meet in Montreal”, “tattooed man in Barcelona.”

If you don’t have a web analytics on your site, you must! Even if you use Google Analytics (Boo…), they’re not real-time, so you have to wait until the next day to see the activities of the previous day, and I don’t think they can track individuo paths. I-stats can. From the moment you get on my sites, I can tell every single click you do and how long you spend in each page. The main value is on the aggregated path analysis, but it’s interesting to follow a visitor every now and then and take the same steps to try to think if you’re displaying all the information you want them to see.

By the way, you can see I-stats Live Demo here. You will actually see this website’s web analytics…