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Are you monitoring everything
about your web site? If not, you are missing an
opportunity to increase your site's effectiveness,
traffic, conversions, and sales. This article can
help you better understand the traffic visiting
your site. A web site monitoring service can help
you ensure that traffic actually reaches your site
and can use the forms and shopping cart in a timely
fashion (before they give up in frustration). |
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Tracking and analyzing traffic to your
website can prove to be invaluable for serious website
owners. You need to know certain information in order
to improve your site, learn which promotion methods
work best for you and to effectively sell advertising.
This information includes statistics such as unique
visits to your site, total pageviews, referring URLs
to your site, common entry and exit pages, and more
depending on what you use to track your traffic. There
are two main ways to do that, through the web logs generated
by your host's web server every time someone requests
a file on your site, or through a 3rd party stat tracking
service.
Many web hosts offer web logs but some don't, you'd
have to ask your individual host if they do. These logs
contain important information such as the user's host
or IP address, the file they requested and at what time
and what URL they were last at. Web analyzing software
can generate reports from this information to display
to you this information about your website. Several
are:
http://www.webtrends.com
http://awsd.com/scripts/weblog
http://www.accessprobe.com
If you don't have web logs or would rather not set
up software to analyze them, another option is to use
an outside tracking service. Most of these come in the
form of free statistics in exchange for placing a small
button or advertisement on each page you'd like to track.
A disadvantage to using these is that nothing is tracked
if the button doesn't load, if for example a visitor
hits the stop button or leaves the page before it's
finished loading. These are several good free stats
services:
http://www.webtrendslive.com
http://www.hitbox.com
http://www.thecounter.com
http://counter.hitslink.com
http://www.webstat.com/
Once you've set up some type of tracking program, whether
it is a web log analyzer or an outside service, you
can use the data you get to improve your site, promote
it, and earn revenue from it. You need to understand
the basic terms most will use:
UNIQUE VISIT
A unique visit is a single computer connecting to your
website. While each visitor may view several pages and
travel throughout your site, they will only register
once as unique (usually per 24 hour period).
PAGEVIEW
A pageview is a count of individual webpages requested
from your site. A single visit may generate a certain
number of pageviews, so by dividing the number of pageviews
by unique visits you can approximate how many pages
of your site each person requests. This can be helpful
in determining whether you need to work on navigation
or add additional enticement for visitors to move throughout
your site.
HIT
A hit is registered for every file requested from your
server. Only web logs can contain information about
hits as every page, image, CGI script, SSI inserted
document, or other file requested gets registered as
a hit; without weblogs you can only analyze pageviews
but not hits.
REFERRER
Each time someone visits a page of any site, their
browser sends a referrer which allows you to track where
they arrived at your site from. This can be used to
analyze which sites are sending visitors your way, allowing
you to track the effectiveness of promotion or advertising.
BROWSER, RESOLUTION, OS
Depending on the software or service you use, you may
be able to track information on any of the above. This
information can be useful in determining what screen
resolution, operating system, an d browser version most
of your visits are using to better serve them. If a
majority of your traffic is running at 640x480 resolution
you wouldn't want to create webpages 800 pixels wide.
The information you gain from analyzing traffic to
your website can prove invaluable. You can use the information
you gain for soliciting advertisers, tracking which
promotion methods work best for your site, and improving
your site. If you're not already doing so, start tracking
your site's traffic now!
About the author:
Dan Grossman runs Website Goodies where you'll find
more articles, tutorials and free tools for website
owners. www.websitegoodies.com |
