Web site traffic analysis

People find your web site in many different ways:

Page links
Search engines
Inserting your link in their favorites
Ads
Email

Referrers

Before you can do a good job of increasing your traffic, it is essential you know where your existing traffic is coming from. Traffic Analysis scripts can tell you who referred them, what IP they are coming from, what key words they are using.

Do you know which search engines or web links are sending you the traffic?

Do you know which key words they are clicking on? Any more, your web site is more than an accessory to your other marketing plans. Web sites are becoming a dominate part of a business's essential marketing tools.

People are searching for information about your company. Do you know how they are or (are not) finding you?

Traffic Analysis scripts give you a count of each country, state and city your visitors are coming from allowing you to analyze and optimize for the audience you are looking for.

On the first page an itemized list is given of the Host/IP address for each unique visitor as well as the referrer, keyword, browser, operating system, resolution, colors, date and time and how long they were at your site.

Visitors

The most important counter is your unique visitors. Many counters will give you the number of page hits and that is essential also. But the true value of your promotions comes in the number of different people coming to your site. You can then take that information and see how many pages they are going to.

Once you know the number of unique visitors and the number of total page hits, you divide the Total/Unique to see what the average number of pages they are going to. If that number is very low, maybe there is something they do not like. Maybe the file size of the page is so large they are clicking off rather than waiting for another page loading or maybe they just do not like the content.

Once you see what the unique visitor count is and the total page hits and the average pages per visitors, you are ready to look at the Individual Page Hits. This will tell you how many people are going to each individual page. This might indicate how enticing your links are or it might indicate where peoples interests lie. Either way, you want to make the best use of these pages.
If they are going through the site (they like it) but do not respond or order anything.. why?
Web site statistics can not answer that question. But without them, how could you possibly know enough to even ask the question? If you do not know what they are doing, how can you possibly make adjustments to your problem? Or better yet, how can you know enough to keep something that is working?

Systems Used

Are you still optimizing your pages for 3.0 browsers? Maybe your traffic (like most of my clients traffic) is using 4.0 browsers. If so you can utilize a lot of "KOOL" features available for 4.0 browsers.

If you are optimizing pages for 1152x864 resolution (or ?) and your traffic is mostly 800x600 you could be aggravating your traffic by making them scroll over to see the balance of the page. Or your pages might not be utilizing the space you have for the majority of your traffic.

If you are optimizing for millions of colors and most of your traffic has 8 bit, are you sure your pages are coming out like you anticipated.

Most web-sites are designed to be used by the majority of operating systems. But if you are focusing on a particular operating system such as Windows ME or Windows XP or just wondering what operating system people are using,Traffic Analysis scripts show you :

• Top operating system/browser combinations
• Top operating systems (alone)
• Top browsers (alone)
• Monitor resolution