Web Traffic Analysis
 Analysing
your web traffic can reveal valuable information about the
habits of your customers. You can see what pages they find
the most compelling, the ones they're not interested in, what part
of the world they live in, what type of browsers they use, and much
more. In fact, the facts can get overwhelming and I often find myself
lost in a flood of too much information.
Every time a visitor comes to your website,
they leave a trail behind on the web hosting server in the form
of log files. These files can be analyzed, compiled and presented
in different formats to gain new insights into the ways people use
your website. These insights then serve as a guide to future web
development, edits, or additions to your web pages and services.
Here's some of the things you can find out from
your log files:
- The number of visitors and pageviews
to each page of your website
- Your visitors IP address
which can be translated into a geographic location
- What time, day of the week, and season
people access your site
- Which keywords or phrases
your visitors are using to find your site using a search engine
- Which advertisements are viewed
most on your website
- Detailed information on visitors
and demographics
Uncovering your Visitor's Profile
This information doesn't sound too glamorous
or revealing, but consider this...If your IP addresses are mostly
from the midwest wouldn't it be a safe bet that advertising in their
yellow pages might be effective? How about if most of your visitors
come on Saturday? This would suggest they are surfing from home,
and most people still have dial-up connections at home, so maybe
you should optimize for slow bandwidth presentation.
Keywords and phrases are revealing as well.
They tend to show what's not working more than what is. If I've
optimized a page for 5 terms, but only one is proving effective,
then I still have some tweaking to do on the other 4 terms.
By looking at the number of times certain files
or pages are downloaded you can determine what content is of value
to your customers. If you have an online schedule of events and
it's your #1 visited page, maybe you should consider developing
an email list to send the schedule directly to members when updated
versions become available.
Be sure to monitor any advertising you're doing
online. You can track how many times visitors were sent from another
URL and then based on those number either buy more or discontinue
further advertising.
What's important is to quantify your results.
I have gotten in the habit of pulling general statistics each month,
printing them and throwing them in a folder. After several months,
you begin to see a pattern emerge and most often, I have found that
an online business experiences a different season that does it's
brick and mortar counterpart. You can use this information to be
prepared for next year or market more heavily to generate traffic
in typically slow seasons.
Most web hosting companies offer web traffic
statistics although there exist a multitude of software packages
designed to get as detailed as you want. I have found that what
matters most to me is to be able to view the information in a variety
of formats. For instance, if I say that 20% of our web traffic in
December is between Friday and Sunday who cares? But what if I say
that we had 500,000 visitors to our site in December? Then those
weekend visitors total 100,000. Maybe we should target specials
that start on Friday and end on Sunday.
To find out what tools are available for web
traffic analysis, check your web hoster's website or call their
toll-free number. The articles below will provide more in-depth
information on this complicated subject and point you to other software
solutions if your web hoster doesn't supply them.
Helpful Websites
Five
Reasons to Track Website Traffic by SmallTech
How
to Analyze Web Traffic by Radiation
How to Analyze
your Website Traffic by iSiteBuild.com
Analyzing
Web Site Traffic by Sane Solutions (this links to a PDF file
which requires Adobe
Acrobat Reader)
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