Joeychgo
02-26-2005, 12:06 AM
Analyze Your Web Site Traffic
Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don?t know which direction they are coming from or who they are. Its crucial to analyze your web traffic because without analyzing your web site traffic, it's difficult to improve your web site search engine ranking and marketing. Most web hosting companies use Webalizer or AWSTATS. Personally I wouldnt use a host who didnt. This article should give you a little idea as to what all that jargon means.
Definitions
You should be aware of the various terms used to describe web site traffic, so your not confused about your web site visitors. Here are what some of the main terms used mean:
Visit: these are all requests made by a specific user to the site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or hostnames/ip addresses
Hit: this is a request to the server for a file not a page. Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting in a number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a hit. Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes multiple hits to view a page so dont get too excited when you see your HITS at 1 million or more -
Pageview/Impression: this is the number of times a page is accessed as a whole. If you take this number and divide it by VISITS you can see how many pages your average visitor views per visit. This is an important calculation because if your average pages viewed per visitor is too low you know your not holding their attention and can work to make your site more attractive to visitors so they stay and view more.
Unique View: A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour period. Most advertisers want to know how many 'Uniques' you get and how many pageviews.
Referrer: Where users come from when connected via link. By looking at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your site and driving traffic to you. This can be particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine traffic is coming from. Some ststictics programs such as AWSTATS have specific columns for Major Search engine ststistics.
User Agent: This refers to the software used to access your site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or "client", the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when individual search engines last crawled your pages.
Conclusion
Web traffic statistics provide very valuable information about your web site. You can make better marketing decisions through them telling you: Which Web pages are most popular and which are least used. Who is visiting your Web site. Which Web browsers to optimize your Web pages for. Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful. Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages. Web traffic analysis allows you to determine what marketing strategies are successful, then to change them accordingly, to boost your web traffic.
Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don?t know which direction they are coming from or who they are. Its crucial to analyze your web traffic because without analyzing your web site traffic, it's difficult to improve your web site search engine ranking and marketing. Most web hosting companies use Webalizer or AWSTATS. Personally I wouldnt use a host who didnt. This article should give you a little idea as to what all that jargon means.
Definitions
You should be aware of the various terms used to describe web site traffic, so your not confused about your web site visitors. Here are what some of the main terms used mean:
Visit: these are all requests made by a specific user to the site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or hostnames/ip addresses
Hit: this is a request to the server for a file not a page. Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting in a number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a hit. Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes multiple hits to view a page so dont get too excited when you see your HITS at 1 million or more -
Pageview/Impression: this is the number of times a page is accessed as a whole. If you take this number and divide it by VISITS you can see how many pages your average visitor views per visit. This is an important calculation because if your average pages viewed per visitor is too low you know your not holding their attention and can work to make your site more attractive to visitors so they stay and view more.
Unique View: A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour period. Most advertisers want to know how many 'Uniques' you get and how many pageviews.
Referrer: Where users come from when connected via link. By looking at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your site and driving traffic to you. This can be particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine traffic is coming from. Some ststictics programs such as AWSTATS have specific columns for Major Search engine ststistics.
User Agent: This refers to the software used to access your site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or "client", the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when individual search engines last crawled your pages.
Conclusion
Web traffic statistics provide very valuable information about your web site. You can make better marketing decisions through them telling you: Which Web pages are most popular and which are least used. Who is visiting your Web site. Which Web browsers to optimize your Web pages for. Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful. Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages. Web traffic analysis allows you to determine what marketing strategies are successful, then to change them accordingly, to boost your web traffic.
