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.
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.
