How to analyze your website traffic

Mats Lonnstrom | Published 09/18/2007 | Traffic Building | Unrated

How to analyze your website traffic

Before you start your website analysis, you first have to understand how to interpret the data being presented.

Hosting companies can give you with basic web traffic information that you have to understand and make use of. But then, the data you are getting from your host company can appear too hard to handle if you do not understand how to apply it to your business and website.

Statistics are probably the most precise assessment of how your website is thriving. Thinking that your website is performing well just by looking at your traffic is the most common misconception any website owner can make.

You need to understand how your website visitors are doing once they visited your site. This is how you can accurately distinguish if your site is effective or not.

* Differentiate hits from quality website traffic.

Hits. This is basically the number of requests taken in by the server. If you think that a hit is equal to the number of graphics per page, then you are thinking wrong.

These hits are not really effective tools in analyzing website traffic.

Your interpretation would be more accurate once you see the number of visitors that are coming in your website. On the same note. Your analysis will be more precise once you have achieved a great number of website traffic.

Once you are not getting large numbers of website visitors, the more your analysis will be misinterpreted.

* The purpose of website traffic analysis.

The main purpose of the statistics is to work out how well or how badly your website is working for your visitors. An ideal ways of trying of knowing is to find out the time your visitor spends on your site.

If they stayed for a only a short period of time, assume that there is a problem. Your goal is to find out what that problem is. You have to know why your visitors did not stay long to check out your site. What made them left ?

* Keywords.

A one thing to be considered. Maybe the keywords that you have used in the search engines are getting you not the targeted website visitors that you wanted. Or it may be what is in your site. Maybe what the visitors have seen have turned them off and they choose to leave. This could be the graphics, fonts or any other visible aspects that you have used in your site.

The keywords are important aspects in bringing quality visitors to your site who are prepared to get or buy your offer. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor's needs and motivations.

Try to get to the bottom of this problem. When you have pinpointed what it is, work out a solution so that the same problem will not be encountered again. You can test your new findings and see if they have resulted well. Are your website visitors staying for some time now?

This is where website traffic analysis will help you the most. Sometimes, you get to believe that you have a page that is doing well. But then, you noticed that your visitors do not find it so.

Try and make changes to that page. Take the links, for example. Make them more visible and more catching so your visitors have more tendency to click on that. You could make an improvement on your page. Remove clutters. Your visitors do not want to feel claustrophobic. Make your page accessible.

When you notice that your visitors are staying more on the page that you do not give much focus about, you may consider checking that page out and moving all your most important products on that specific page.

Website traffic analysis can give out important information about how well or how poor your site is performing. This is a crucial factor that any Internet business will not do without if they want to maintain the effectiveness of their website.

Mats Lonnstrom is the author of Web Traffic In A Box. Download this Brand New Free report by visiting http://promoteoptions.com/webtrafficinabox/articles

Reprinted from: http://www.ValuableContent.com