Analysing web traffic to improve your marketing26 April 2005
Analysing your website traffic will help you find out:
- Which pages on your website are the most/least popular.
- Who is visiting your website, and which website they are being referred from.
- Which keywords and key phrases people who arrive via a search engine have used.
- Which countries visitors come from.
This data will enable you to improve your marketing, as you will be able to see if reciprocal links or adverts on other websites are generating traffic, for example, or track the usefulness of search engine keywords.
Methods of gathering web traffic statistics include:
- Putting a counter on your web page to count the number of visitors. This method is typically used by personal web pages and isn't particularly reliable (the numbers can easily be altered).
- Using tracking software to provide information on the paths visitors take to, through and from your website. The data analysis is usually provided by an external organisation, which gives you a piece of code to place on your website. Providers include Nedstat, Site Stats and StatCounter.
- Using the log files from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or web server. These usually need interpreting with a statistical analysis package, such as Webalizer or Web Trends.
What statistics/data should you get?
The types of information you should expect to get include:
- Number of visitors: this tells you how many customers came to your site and requested a web page. They may request more than one page, but are usually just counted as a single visitor.
- Number of page views: this tells you how many web pages have been requested. This will help you measure how "sticky" your website is - if you have 10 visitors, and 100 page views, on average each visitor is looking at 10 pages on your website. Large numbers of pages per visitor mean your visitors are interested in your content, and are exploring and browsing around. You will also be able to determine which pages are the most popular.
- Number of hits: this tells you how many requests there have been for files or graphics (visiting one web page could therefore generate several 'hits'). This is less useful than the number of page views.
- List of referrers: this tells you where your visitors are coming from - essentially the last URL a customer visited before they came to your website.
- Search engine keywords: this tells you which keywords and phrases your customers used in a search engine to find your website. It will help you discover which keywords are working (or not), and may give you ideas for new keywords to optimise your pages with.
You may also have access to data such as which countries your customers are coming from and which web browsers they are using.
