Analyzing Your Website Traffic

An important aspect of your web business is analyzing your website traffic. This will give you proper understanding of your website visitors behavior so that you can adjust your keywords, content and/or fine-tune your web pages to increase conversion rates.

But before you can analyze your website traffic you must know what to look for and how to interpret the data collected.

Hits

They are simply the number of information requests received by the server. If your web page has 15 graphics, the server will record 16 hits (15 for graphics and 1 for html file), when in actual fact only one visitor is requesting for the web page. The hits figure is inflated. It is not useful in analyzing your web traffic.

Page Views

It is exactly what it means. For example if a visitors access 5 pages of your website, your web host server will record 5 page views. Page view does not tell you how many different visitors are coming by your website. Though, it is a good gauge of the ability of your web pages to retain the interest of your visitors. This is an important consideration for attracting high paying advertisers.

Visitors

Your web host server captures the IP addresses of your visitors (not search robots) and records the number of people who visited your website. The same visitor who visited 20 pages of your website will register 20 page views but only 1 visitor.

Obviously page view and visitors are essential to analyzing your web traffic and understanding visitors' behavior.

Effectiveness of your web pages

At a glance, it would appear that the more visitors you see recorded, then your website must be doing well. Not necessarily. You must look at the behavior of your visitors once they landed on your web page to properly gauge the effectiveness of your website. One way to determine this is to find out how much time on average visitors spend at your website. If the time spent is short, it could mean one of three things or all.

1.Your keywords are attracting the wrong kind of visitors.

2.You need to improve on your page content.

3.Your web design is too overwhelming that visitors find it hard to navigate, causing them to exit quickly.

You need to pinpoint the problem and fix it. Then use the average time spent by visitors at your website to gauge the effectiveness of the fix.

Every website has exit pages, such as final sales order or contact page. As the name suggests, this is the page where your visitors make their exit. However, it is normal for your web data to show several exit pages because not every visitor will find exactly what he/she is looking for. If you notice an exit trend on a particular page that is not designed to be an exit page, for example your homepage, then you need to closely examine it and fix the problem. Once the problem is fixed you'll see visitors moving through your website instead of exiting at the wrong page.

If you notice visitors spending a lot of time on a particular page, it would be wise to shift your marketing focus to the page in mention.

Key Search Phrase

You are getting targeted traffic if your key search phrases bring you consistent traffic. The more targeted your web traffic the chances of conversion are higher.

Lastly, if you find that visitors are finding your site by typing in your URL, it means you have achieved brand recognition.

Congratulations!

Accuracy of Your Interpretation of Web Data

The accuracy of the interpretation of your web data is proportional to the numbers of your website visitors. That means if more visitors come to your website, the more accurate will be your interpretation, and the more precise your analysis of visitors behavior. For smaller number of visitors, a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

Analyzing website data is time consuming but it is worth it. It is an important area of your Internet marketing campaign. Imagine spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars on advertising to drive targeted to your site and yet see low conversion rates, and you have no clue how to fix the problem. Or you may spend hours modifying your web pages without knowing how effective are the changes you have made.

Interpreting your website traffic data correctly is crucial to your business bottom-line. It is imperative for every online marketer to know how to analyze website traffic data with competence.

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