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This article is about monitoring
and understanding the traffic to your web site.
Don't forget the importance also of web site performance
monitoring, because if your forms or shopping carts
are down, you won't make very much money. |
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If you want to know how much traffic
is coming to your site, which pages are bringing the
most traffic, where are your visitors coming from, and
when is traffic coming in, you just have to analyze
your website's statistics.
Nowadays, most web hosts utilize Webalizer, a powerful
program that processes your raw traffic logs (long,
text based files with information about your traffic),
and generates meaninful reports presented in the form
of easy to understand graphs and tables. Other hosts
may use different traffic anaylis tools, but they all
work and present the information in a similar fashion.
We'll show you, step by step, how your web site statistics
can answer almost any question you may have about your
traffic:
How much traffic is coming to my site?
The two most important parameters are:
a) Number of Visitors
b) Number of Page Views
The Number of Visitors shows you how many users
come to your site and request a page. The visitor can
move around your site visiting several pages, however
he will still be counted as only one visitor. An exception
to this rule occurs in the rare occasion when a visitor
takes more than half an hour (or the amount of time
set by your host) to click from one page to another,
in which case the program will register two visitors.
The Page Views parameter indicates how many
pages have been requested. It is a very important number
because it is indicative of the "stickiness"
of your site. Stickiness is a good thing: if, for example,
your statistics show 10 visitors, but 50 page views,
it means that, on average, each visitor has viewed 5
pages. A large "page views per visitor" ratio
usually means that your site is so interesting and valuable
that users are inclined to "stick around"
and explore.
Other somehow important parameter, especially if you
have bandwidth restrictions, is the Kilobytes Transmitted.
Sites with a lot of pictures, or sites that allow downloads
(reports, ebooks, audio files or video) will incur in
significant bandwidth usage. If you operate a plain
HTML site but still show an abnormally high bandwidth
usage, you may need to optimize
your images to make them less heavy.
Finally, a less important measure (although it was
heavily hyped in the early days of the web) is the number
of Hits. Hits represent the number of files sent
to a user after a page request. If a page has 30 pictures,
one sigle visit will trigger 31 hits: thirty for the
pictures and one for the page itself.
Through where on my site is traffic coming in?
You may be interested in knowing which pages of your
site are bringing in the most traffic, since not every
visitor will come through your home page.
Your traffic statistics will show you a list of the
most popular entry pages to your site, ranked by number
of requests. Sometimes, internal pages can bring in
more traffic than the homepage itself. This may happen
when a particular internal page is very well optimized
and regularly shows up at the top of the search engine
results pages (SERPs), or when it offers such good content
that other sites link directly to it.
You will also find a list of the most common exit pages
(the last page your users visited prior to leaving your
site).
How is traffic coming in?
Your traffic statistics will show you a list of referrers.
Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to
your site. Referrers are ranked by the number of hits
they produce. That is why the vast majority of referrers
will be URLs from your own site (since HTML pages usually
contain embedded links to other objects such as graphics
files, they generate a large number of hits). However,
if you filter out your own pages, you will see what
external URLs are bringing in visitors to your pages.
External referrers generally fall into two categories:
- pages that have posted a link to your site, and
- search engine referred traffic.
You will also find an entry in your referrer list
named "Direct Request"; it shows you
the number of times somebody accessed your pages by
either directly typing your URL in the address bar,
by using a bookmark or by following a link on an email
message.
Analyzing your traffic statistics will also tell you
what keywords are your visitors using to find your pages
through search engines. This is extremely important
since it will tell you if your selected keywords are
working or not. It may also bring to your attention
keywords that you may have not thought about. You may
then use those keywords to further optimize your pages
and bring in even more traffic.
When is traffic coming in?
You can also find out when are visitors coming to
your site. You will find statistics by month, by day
and even by hour. This can be useful in a variety of
circumstances. For example, if you publish new content,
you may want to release it during the moments of more
traffic. Your statistics will help you by identifying
the days or hours when more people are likely to visit
your site.
Finally, you will also have access to other interesting
data, like the IP addresses of your visitors, the browsers
they are using, and even the countries they are coming
from.
Altogether, the information you gather from your website's
traffic statistics will provide you with a wealth of
valuable insights, so that you can continuously fine
tune your internet marketing strategy to bring more
traffic to your site.
You can freely reprint
this article provided that you include the following
resource box:
Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who
focuses on web design and Internet marketing topics.
He publishes The Internet Digest
(http://www.theinternetdigest.net
), a growing collection of web design and Internet
marketing articles, tips and resources. You can
freely reprint his weekly articles in your website,
ezine, or ebook. |
