Analyzing Web Site Traffic

Most web hosts provide basic web traffic statistics that you have to analyze to make pertinent use of. The trouble is, for most people, their web site statistics are mostly a mystery. The data can be overwhelming or misleading if you don't understand how to interpret it properly.

Analyzing your web site traffic statistics can help you understand some very important metrics about your site. Let's start by looking at the most basic data—the average number of visitors.

The number of visitors are the most accurate measure of your website's activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this interpretation can be totally inaccurate.

You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge its effectiveness.

There is often a great misconception that "hits" are the measure of success, but hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. A hit includes the web page, each graphics on the page, and any other unique file.

For example, if a page has 15 graphics and a sound file that plays when a link button is clicked, the server will record that like this:

15 images + 1 sound file + the page itself = 17 hits.

As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The goal should be to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors—and you. If it isn't working for them, it won't be working for you either . . . at least not as well as it could be.

One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem or problems. The challenge then becomes discovering what the problems might be. Some common problems:

• Your keywords could be drawing the wrong type of visitors.
• The layout could be too busy, causing the visitor to have to work too hard to find what they want.
• The navigation may be too confusing or it may take too many "clicks" to get to what they wanted.
• The text could be too hard to read, either due to lack of contrast, a background image that interferes with the text, or too small a font size.
• Its appearance may seem unprofessional or amateurish, causing an immediate lack of trust. This includes often overlooked things like spelling errors, poor grammar, and poor writing.
• The site could be too slow to load.

There could be other reasons as well. You need to see your site through your visitors eyes, not as you wish to see it. You may want to enlist the help of friends to gather other opinions and perspectives. If you do, be sure they understand you're looking for constructive criticism, not a pat on the back—and don't hold it against them if they find flaws!

After you identify and fix potential problems, continue to monitor your statistics to measure how effective your changes have been. Bear in mind that the more visitors you get, the more accurate your statistics will be. If you're not getting a lot of traffic, a few unusual visitors can distort the analysis.

Statistical analysis for specific pages can be very helpful in identifying 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 probably needs attention.

On the other hand, if you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page, or try to determine what visitors find useful about it so you can model your important pages after them.

As you can see, statistics can reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, visitor habits, and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has natural exit pages, such as an order form or contact form. These are pages you can expect visitors to exit from. However, if you notice an exit trend on a pages not intended as an exit points, you should look for ways to improve its retention rate. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications can have a significant impact on the keeping your visitors on site.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to turn to an analysis of the keywords and key phrases people have used in searches to find your site. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor - meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase - the more valuable that keyword is.

If you identify good keywords, you may want to build a page specifically optimized for those keywords and key phrases.

However, if you find a lot of visitors are being misdirected to your site by a particular keyword or key phrase that is off-topic, that keyword is calling for an adjustment. Of course, you may have also discovered a related niche topic that you can monetize as well.

Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you, but let's make one thing clear—targeted traffic is what you should be focusing on, not just drawing raw traffic.

Finally, the tips here are basic, utilizing the statistics found in almost every web hosts statistics package. Analysis can go much deeper with more involved statistics, but this minimum analysis should go a long way toward helping improve your web site's performance.