Analyzing Your Website Traffic

by Mark Brown ISS

Analysis is a word that scares many people away however when you factor in the fact that your business depends on it then you begin to realize that analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of reasons. Let's explore these "reasons" further.

Almost all web hosting companies provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make use of. However, the data you receive from your hosting company can also be overwhelming if you don't know how to apply it to your business strategy and website design. Let's look at how examining basic data can make a big difference in your bottom line - the average visitors that come to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis will reveal a pattern that you can use to make your website more profitable than it already is.

Many new website owners make the mistake of thiking that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, this however is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your website's performance.

A prevalent misconception about what is commonly referred to as a "hit" or "hits" and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site continues to exploit it's way throughout the world wide web. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be.

For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not always a useful way to analyze your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

A great way to get more visitors to your website is by using a website marketing service such as ProClickEstate. You can list multiple websites and monitor the number of visitors that you recieve as well as generate additional visitors with little effort.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem such as innefective keywords, or your graphics could be confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit your site rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use measure the effectiveness of your progress.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of more success to come!

© Mark Brown, All rights reserved.
Submitted on 03/27/2006