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[W224]Web Site Traffic Statistics

by John V. W. Howe, Joh

These packages provide a fairly standard set of statistics:

?Daily and weekly hits, files, pages and visits
?Hourly traffic stats
?Top URLs in site (by hits)
?Top entry pages
?Top exit pages
?Top referring sites
?Top keyword search strings
?Top browsers used
?Top operating system of visitors
?Top countries of visitors

All this data is great, but it does not answer the questions, "How does a visitor move through my website?" How long does he/she take on my website? This is very important so you can understand if your site navigation plan is working.

Let's say that you have a particular sales page on your site that you want to move your visitor toward. How do you know if your planned pre-sell plan is working so the visitor will click on the link to the sales page? What you need is visitor path tracking.

Do you know how long a visitor is spending on you site? The standard stats will give you number of page views of each page, but how long is the visitor staying on each page? If the visitor is doing a "drive by viewing", it does not do you much good. You want the visitor to stay and read your content.

You need a tool that can provide you with information that has more dimensions than the standard web hosting packages.

There are sites on the Net that can provide this information free. Use the search engines to find a few of them. A couple of example sites are addfreestats.com or statcounter.com.

The typical traffic analysis site (abbreviated TAS for the rest of this article) will track the activity on your site and give you extensive reports on how your site is being viewed. The stats that you get from it will be much more detailed than most of the basic stats from your web host.

To use the TAS, you establish an account on the TAS with a user name and password. Once you are signed on, you set up a project to monitor your website. You can set up multiple projects to monitor multiple sites.

The TAS generates a few lines of java script for you. You then copy and paste the script into each webpage on your site that you want to monitor. You can select an option on the TAS set up so there is nothing on your page to indicate that the script is there.

Each time the page loads, the script sends info to the TAS that goes into a database. When you want to see the info, you log on the TAS and check out how people are viewing your site.

Most of the traffic analysis sites have the ability or track the visitor's path that will allow you to see exactly the sequence of pages that the visitor viewed and how he/she browsed you site. You can walk through your site with your visitor and make certain that you are managing them on your site.

This is a great tool. If you are building a website, I highly recommend that you install the small script on every page that you want to track.

I have posted an educational video to show how a typical traffic analysis site works.

http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Videos/V1I40Video/Click-to-Play.html

I encourage you to research the various sites that provide this service and include one in your plans for building your website

The main reason for analyzing statistical information for your website is to discover the daily and weekly trends of the traffic in your site. Knowing how to read statistical data from these reports puts you in a much better position to research for your marketing campaigns and to see what works and what does not. If you really know what you want, then you can begin determining the best marketing methods from the statistical data in web site traffic reports. This way, you will not waste valuable time with a marketing system that does not generate good traffic sales.

The statistical reports with "numbers" can be misleading. Often times, "hits" are counted in different ways. Just because someone visits your website does not necessarily mean that they read any of the information, or watched your video. The main idea about using website statistics is to use them to identify trends. By doing this, you can gauge your traffic over time to see if the flow is increasing or decreasing.

Looking for trends helps you to recognize if your new marketing campaign is having any major increase or decrease in your traffic flow. From this standpoint, you can now look more closely at why the new campaign is not heading the way you expected it to and what are the actions you can take to fix the problem. Statistical data will also give you a good indication of whether you should wait awhile longer or take immediate action.

When using website statistics, there are four major categories you should be concerned with.

1. The number of unique visitors helps to determine if the site is getting more or less visitors each month. Their location will tell you the visitor's origin. This can be very important to you if the concern you have is that your campaign reaches a global market, other than within the United States. Depending on the ISP, you should at least be able to pin down which countries most of the visitors are coming from.

It is also important to be able to distinguish "hits" from "visitors". Every person visiting your site is a "visitor". Every time a visitor looks at a different page, clicks on a graphic, or clicks on any content within your pages, these are considered "hits". Do not get your statistics confused with hits versus visitors.

2. "Time of Day Activity" is an area in your website's statistics that helps determine what days of the week you have the most action on your site and at what times this happens. It is important for you to know that one of the busiest times for traffic searches on the Internet is that on weekdays, right after lunch time. Knowing the times of day that your website activity spikes also helps you pinpoint more closely where in the US many of your visitors are coming from; the east coast, or the west, etc.

3. The statistics on "Pages" gives you a lot of insight into where everyone is going within your website. Knowing that gives you the opportunity to beef up some of the pages that are not getting a lot of traffic.

4. The Error report will let you know if some people have had problems getting around your site. This report will allow you to fix the bugs or have chats with your web host.

Knowing how to read your statistic reports puts you ahead when making crucial business decisions about your sites and campaigns. The reports are useful tools that can help you find the right marketing approach to get good traffic to your site.

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Both John V. W. Howe & Pieter Van Der Gulik are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

John V. W. Howe has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, How to Sell on Ebay and Retirement. John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband, father, and grandfather. He has been involved in entrepreneurial activities for over 40 years. He founded www.boomer-ezine.com and www.retirement-jobs-online.com to help Boomer. John V. W. Howe's top article generates over 27100 views. to your Favourites.

Pieter Van Der Gulik has sinced written about articles on various topics from Affiliate Programs, Computers and The Internet and Computers and The Internet. Pieter van der Gulik is an authority on Web Traffic Sales Conversion providing valuable advice at where you can learn more about. Pieter Van Der Gulik's top article generates over 22200 views. to your Favourites.