Web Site Traffic Measurement
One of the most important aspects of managing a website is measuring the statistics from your site. Understanding what you're presented with is equally important. Analysing your website stats can show which pages are successful or unsuccessful and help you employ techniques to improve site performance.
Some sites have hit counters installed but displaying your sites success (or more important lack of) could be an incentive not to employ this measure. Instead use the stats your website ISP should provide for you (you may need to trigger your stats package from your ISP control panel or contact them directly to start reporting). Most stats packages report on the following:
Month history - This is a great measure for looking at your month on month performance, the key data is usually restricted to Visitors, Pages, Hits and Bandwidth
Weekly history - Shows activity from Monday - Sunday, is a good indicator of daily activities.
Hours - Brilliant for looking at what people get up to during the day, depending on how geographically placed your web site is you will see interesting flows of website activity. For example my pages always peak between 12:00 - 14:00 while people are presumably at work on their lunch.
Countries - This is very useful for targeting your website, my websites are mainly looked at by people in the USA, and consequently I gear my site towards this market.
Visits - Shows the frequency of visits.
Hits - Can be misleading, a hit is a request for a page component i.e. web page or graphic.
Pages - Average pages viewed
Bandwidth - You can incur costs for high bandwidth on your site it's always worth checking to see how much data traffic is on your site and find out from your ISP what your limits are.
Visitor browser - It's always worth designing your page to suit the most popular browser viewing your site.
Referrers - How are people being referred to your site? From search engines, link partners etc.
Keywords - Great for seeing how people are finding your site from the keywords they enter. You can see what keyword strings people are entering and develop and focus on the search questions people ask.
HTTP status code - Very important for checking the availability of your pages. If a visitor gets Error 404 when they click on one of your pages you will loose potential traffic and further re-visits from the customer.
Instead of using your ISP's reporting tool you can always buy a package off the shelf or alternatively use a variety of websites to help manage your web traffic reporting needs. For my sites I use a variety of tools for monitoring my site traffic.
For measuring the success of my adsense campaigns I use the category tool within the adsense tool to see which pages are more successful than others. I then use this feedback to reshape and publish my advert coverage.
I also have www.google.com amd www.alexa.com toolbar on my browser which helps me measure my sites importance and ranking on the web. At the click of a button I can view my sites traffic rank by visiting www.alexa.com More importantly you can see your competitions performance.
To target my audience I use the www.google.com adsense keyword sandbox to find content that meets the top ranking keyword searches.
It's hard work and time consuming trying to increase your site traffic, using the tools above will help you analyse your sites traffic and make informed decisions as to how your visitors are behaving.... good luck.
About the Author
Julian Addington-Barker is the owner of www.articlesafe.com, www.dogtraininginfo.co.uk and www.silversapling.co.uk.