Management: Increased Web Site Traffic

Web site Traffic Statistics
Web site statistics are important for you to get a grip on who is coming to your web site, how long they stay, what they look at and when / why they leave. There are a number of programs available that provide these statistics, some more useful than others.

Webalizer and Awstats are both powerful programs that processes your server logs (long, text based files with information about your traffic) to generate meaningful reports presented in the form of easy to understand graphs and tables.

How much traffic is coming to my site?
The two most important parameters are:

  • Number of Visitors
  • Number of Page Views

The Number of Visitors, and there are unique and repeat visitors, tells you how many users come to your site. The visitor can move around your site visiting several pages but will still be counted as only one visitor.

The number of Page Views indicates how many pages have been requested. Newer versions of awstats will distinguish between pages that were actually viewed and those that were just pulled from the server, for example by a search engine spider. You want a large number of page views per visitor because it shows that your web site is attracting and holding the attention of viewers, thus providing you with greater opportunity to sell to them.

There are many other statistics, like bandwidth consumed, that are not really helpful in determining the useful of your site to the visitor. However, they may be useful in determining costs.

Hits are even less useful because every component of a page, a text block, each image, increments the hit counter.

Entry Pages
It is useful to know which pages are the 'landing' pages of your web site. This tells you how people are finding your web site. For example, which pages are being indexed at the top of search engine lists.

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. You need to filter out referring pages that are your pages to garner useful information about external links to your web site.

Both external links, from link management programs and other web sites, and search engines generate referrer links.

Direct requests refer to a direct hit, i.e. someone typed your URL into their address bar or used their browser 'favorites' or bookmarks to get to your site.

Analyzing your traffic statistics will also tell you which keywords your visitors are using to find your pages through search engines. This is the most important aspect of statistics research as it tells you if your keywords are working.

When is traffic coming in?
Knowing the day, day of week and time that people are visiting your web site will help you to determine (guess) at the age and other demographics of your visitors which will, in turn, help you to fine tune your content.

Altogether, the information you gather from your web site'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.