If you're just getting started with ClickTracks, you'll find it's a very versatile tool. It presents information by overlaying it on your actual Web pages. It also allows you to create reports "on fly" so that you can look at your visitors' behaviour on your site in very different and detailed ways.

But if analyzing Web metrics is new to you, charts, figures and mass of potential data can still be quite overwhelming. It's helpful to have some starting points and questions in mind as you study reports so that you can find most useful information.

This article offers some ideas and examples to spark your thinking:

Navigation Report

This report shows you (among other things) how many visitors clicked on each link, and how long they spent on this page.

If you have links that receive few or no clicks:

* Is link image or link text too small? * Is it in a colour that doesn't show up well or could pose problems for visitors with visual impairments? * Is it badly placed or hard to find on page? * Is it too far down? - check time spent on page to get an idea of whether * visitors are reading most or all of content. Remember that first screenful of page has best chance of being seen.

If none of above seem true:

* Is link text confusing - perhaps wording is different or not included on other pages? * Is link not attractive or engaging to your visitors? * Or, is content behind link simply not of interest?

Links that receive many clicks:

* Should content behind this link be highlighted even more on your site, since it is clearly of interest?

Placements to think about:

* If you have an internal search engine on your site, is it linked in a prominent place on each page? * Featured products or other items - can you increase clicks that they receive by improving their position?

Time spent on page:

* Does average time on this page seem too short, especially if page is long? - check number of visitors who are exiting site from this page. If a lot of people are spending a short time on a page and leaving, consider splitting content across more pages:

* This can be especially helpful, e.g. when displaying a list of items for purchase - showing each on a separate page allows you to track which offerings are most interesting to visitors, and to highlight them better

* Shortening pages also reduces risk that visitors will miss items further down if they choose not to scroll

Search Report

This report shows keywords and phrases that brought visitors to your site, broken down by individual search engines.

Which keywords or key phrases are most effective for you:

* Which search words or phrases draw most traffic?

* Which search words or phrases result in most time spent on your site? These are visitors who are most engaged in your content, but what were they looking for when they came to you?

* Are there any surprises? Sometimes search engines pick up keywords from your site copy that you may not have thought of as significant - these can be valuable information about how your visitors describe or think about what you offer. A lot of demand for something on your site can give you ideas for enhancing or expanding your products and services.

Which search engines are most effective?

* If your site is optimized for one search engine in particular, is that engine bringing you traffic? If you're paying for search engine optimization (other than pay per click), is your service providing a justifiable return on investment?

* If you have very effective keywords on one search engine, can you improve their position on others?

* Do you recognize your non search engine referrers?

* How are you linked to? Are references to you legitimate? Are there sites that link to you that you're not comfortable with - either because they're not describing your site offerings correctly, or perhaps you simply don't want to be associated with them!

* Should you thank referrer? Often, sites will link to you without letting you know. If you appreciate them for doing this, you can create an even stronger -and potentially more profitable relationship.

For help in creating specific ClickTracks reports, see Part 2: Labelling Options. For help in using ClickTracks to evaluate your "must-see" pages, see Part 3 of this series.

Part 2: Labelling Options

ClickTracks allows you to segment your visitors in many ways using "Create Labels" tool. You create instant reports to answer questions about patterns of specific types of visitor, and track their responses to your site.

Here are some ideas for using this option:

Comparing Search Engine / Non Search Engine Traffic

Visitors come to your site either from search engines, from other sites that link to you, from e-mail marketing messages or e-zines, or perhaps from their own bookmarks.

Use ClickTracks "Create Labels" tool, and select "referred from any search engine" as your criteria to track all search engine visitors. Then, create another label using same criteria, but select "Inverse" to identify all visitors not referred from a search engine.

Now you can investigate:

Are search engine visitors more responsive to your site than those who find you in other ways:

* Which type of visitor spends longer on site?

* Which type of visitor is more likely to reach one of your "goal" or "must-see" pages? (see Part 3 of this series for more on this topic).

This a shameless marketing article but we're hard faced enough to take on odds you're going to read it A-Z. It is story of how we ended up in top echelons of major search engines.

The website in question is www.contentClix.com . this one. We -the five of us- live together in a big, crooked house overlooking lovely canals in Amsterdam and when we don´t play table tennis, we write long, short, medium and stupendously superfluous copy for a variety of international websites who generally are on lookout for content that´s crisp and freshly European.

Short sentences for instructional copy. Long ones that everyone can still get their head around by time last i has been dotted for rest.

We ourselves did not set out to reach top rankings in any overly organised way. That's why we had so much fun doing research into issue. And we've become totally addicted to finding out what are best tools out there to really go about achieving effectiveness.

To be entirely clear, contentclix web presence is nothing more than ten pages, with a total of 19 incoming links as of today. We have not purchased expensive keywords nor did we advertise ourselves anywhere or use any seo gimmickry.

So here we go, this is our report of our post-search engine listing internal inquiry into our mysterious jackpot hit. ContentClix has a list of 22 keywords. (ContentClix, content clix, clix, content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copywriter, creative labs, creative writing, story writing, editorial, editing services, journalism, reporting, freelance writer, freelance writing, writing resources).

We chose these initially because we feel they describe our business accurately and we think that these are words that spring to mind first when you are looking to find a bunch of copywriters like us. We included our name because somebody said we had to.

ContentClix is a bland name. On purpose, because we believe that having a posh name is stupid, an overly arty one pretentious. After weeks of not being able to decide, one early Monday morning following a frantic work weekend because we´d missed deadline after deadline for a big account, all five of us agreed that having a practical, functional name would remind us to put in some work hours while we are here.

(We were going to be named 038 at first but it appears to be a number quite well known in chemistry, referring to a mineral known as ´strontium´ which in this country´s language is like ´shittium´ in English so that was a no no, mostly regretted by our office molecule clixy who is responsible for our blog, url we´ll advertise soon enough.)

How did we find out where we actually ranked in search engines? We ran a search on a tool that's most widely used by professional seo's to check backlinks to websites. It's called www.marketleap.com. A very appropriate name for venture, because it made us literally leap.

Another site offers free google page rank checks and probability checks of your site. This is what it said about us: "Results: Your current Google PageRank is 3. Based on our calculations, we predict your future PageRank after next Google update will be 3, an increase of 2.63%". That was enough for us to be totally intrigues as to how things actually work in reality with search engines. Call us dopey, but our expertise lies in writing sales texts, not search engines.

Using a trial version of keyword specialist boyz at www.wordtracker.com, we set out on our quest to see what's so special about them. Wordtracker uses parallel browsers dogpile and metacrawler to simulate queries that people run on largest search engines.

Each time a user types in any of keywords, a spider of real life engines will be actively looking for terms and somehow this signal is picked up by metacrawlers too and counted by wordtracker software. It has a database with around 368 million searches from last 60 days. These are some of combinations of keywords and rankings they yield.

In quick succession, we ran these 10 arbitrary tests:

1) Entering first half of string of words into search box:

ContentClix, content clix, content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Yieldedthisresult:->Page 1 in Lycos, Hotbot and Alta Vista!

2) Since not many people will have heard of us it's not likely they will be typing in our name in search engines, so we took out our name from list: content clix, content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Result:->Page 1 listings on All web and Yahoo.

3) We get hang of it and reduce words one by one from then onwards yields this, even more surprising

content clicks, clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy

Result:-> All web, Alta vista, Hotbot, Lycos

4) We are starting not to believe our eyes here. Cutting out my what we thought to be most vital words (content and clicks within comma's) keywords:

clicks, writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy,

delivers these astounding results: -> Page one rankings on: All Web, AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos Pro

5) The bonanza goes on:

writing, website content, copywriting, ghostwriting, copywriter, ghostwriter, advertising copy