Analyzing your website traffic is a valuable tool for understanding how many visitors your website is receiving and how they are coming to your website. This gives almost immediate feedback on how your website is being received by your site visitors. Almost all the traffic statistics packages (Statcounter, Google Analytics, Awstats) will give you the basic information you need to build your website visitors and enhance your internet marketing plan. Establishing effective web analytics on your site is not expensive, but incredibly valuable. Traffic statistics measures if your website draws any traffic and gives insight into the nature of that traffic and activity of you site visitors. Don’t obsess over your site statistics but use them as a tool to find out what your visitors find interesting.
- Overall Trend: Is there a steady increase in traffic coming to your site? I watch the total number of visits, the number of unique visitors and the volume of visits each day.
- Most Popular: Which pages are attracting the most traffic? I will look at this in two ways. I look at the pages that are being viewed most often and try to figure out what is taking people to this page. I will also look at which pages are listed as entry pages. These are usually the ones being found in searches.
- Referral Traffic: Which sites are sending you visitors? Visit the site and investigate if it is a link from a website, a blog posting or perhaps a link in a comment that you have left.
- Referring Search Engines: Which search engines are referring visitors to you? You are probably ranked well for one or more search terms on this engine. If it’s a keyword you want others to find through search engines, write a blog post or add a page with that keyword in the headline.
- Keywords: Which keyword phrases are you being found for? Find the page that is generating the traffic and see what you did? If this is a phrase you are targeting, see how you can do this again. It helps you to know how to optimize your site for SEO even better and can give hints on what content to write more about.
- Bounce Rate: Some Statistics packages such as Google Analytics show the Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of people who leave your website without viewing any extra pages. Bounce rates under 50% are good, if it is greater than 75% then you need to make some changes.
Many of the traffic statistics packages also allow you to set and measure specific goals. Understanding the goals of you site and setting up measurement of these can create a great focus in the measurement system and help you to drive the right type of activity in your site. Learn more about web analytics so you can ensure that your website is working efficiently for your business.
