Analyse your web site traffic

Ok, you've built your site, you've promoted it, the next step is to work out how effective you're being - analyse your traffic. There are two main reasons this is important a) you can improve your site armed with this data and b) you can use it to sell advertising/generate revenue on your site, when traffic is sufficient.

You'll want to know the answers to some key questions if your site is going to thrive:-

• Where is your traffic coming from?
• Which promotion is proving most effective?
• Which pages on your website are working best?
• What are people actually doing on your site?
• Who's coming to your site?
• How long are they staying?
• Where are they going when they leave?

You may have designed your site to be on a particular subject but you may find you're listed well for something unplanned - Monty Python for example - often, as in this case, you can ignore such data but sometimes it can be very useful to show where you can improve and develop your site.

The list of question and the uses for this information is almost endless.

The data:

Depending on which option you choose you'll expect a good solution to provide you with statistics on such things as unique page views, total page views, referring URLs to your site, common entry and exit pages. There are two main ways to do this - through the web logs generated by your host's web server every time someone requests a file on your site or through a third party tracking service.

Web logs

Your ISP or web host may provide this information to you for free, it will contain much of the stats explained above. You can then use analysis software to generate reports from these log files. Here a few example services to consider.

• http://www.accessprobe.com
• http://www.webtrends.com
• http://awsd.com/scripts/weblog
  

Online services - the easier route

Probably the easier route and the only route if you don't get web logs is to use one of the excellent online tracking services. These will require you to enter code directly into each page of your website and will then track all traffic and typically provide you with online reports.

To pay?

Almost all the services mentioned below have a fee based services as well as their free offering. By paying (typically $5-20 a month) you can get advanced web stats and won't have to display any advertising for the provider. This can be a good option it really depends on your needs - it's best to check out each of the providers and see which one is best for you.

or not to pay...

We like things to be free ;-) and thankfully there are several online stat services which provide free full site tracking. There are however two main disadvantages:-

• You'll have to display a small button for the service on every page you want tracked - but to be honest this isn't a major hardship for most webmasters and can be hidden and @omic's are at the bottom of the page.
• If the button image fails to load the hit may not be registered by the tracking software which won't give you the true traffic figure for your site - but then we all expected a bit of error and we're guessing that for most of you any stats will be a big step forward.

• http://www.webtrendslive.com (we think this is the best free service)
• http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/
• http://www.hitbox.com
• http://www.thecounter.com
• http://counter.hitslink.com
• http://www.webstat.com/

What next?

Once you've got the stat's flowing in you need to start thinking about the data and using it to improve your web site, promote it, and earn revenue from it. So which statistics will be most useful in this endeavour?

Unique Visits

A unique visit is one computer (we can't say person, because we can't tell who's using it) accessing your site. They can surf many pages of your site, refresh etc but they will only be one visitor. Normally even returns within 24hrs will not count as additional visits.

Pageview

Page views are the counts of the number of individual web pages requested from your site. Each unique visit can generate any number of page views and by dividing the total page views by the unique visits we can get a feel for how well visitors are moving around the your site, do you need to improve navigation etc.

Hit

A hit is each request for each element of each page so for example each image within a page is a hit in addition to the hit counted for the request for the html page it's self. Typically this information is only available if your ISP/Host provides log files.

Referrer

Where is your traffic coming from? Basically everytime someone comes to your site it's possible to log where they cam from, this can be the search engine and search string the used, a website linking to you, email, newsgoups or almost any other clickable link. This information is invaluable to you in telling you where you can best spend your promotion resources for maximum effect.

Browser, Resolution, OS

Again critical information for budding web masters. What sort of machine is your visitor looking at your site with. Are they using IE/NS and what version? What screen resolution are they using (800x600 pixels)? What type of OS (operating system) is it (win98/win2k/mac)? This is all critical information in helping you understand how people use your site and how best to tailor your content for them. If you found for example that most people left your site after the home page and your site is designed for resolutions larger than 800x600 yet your visitors all use 800x600 it's a pretty good guess that's the problem.

Success is in the numbers

All successful websites watch their stats, they are essential tools for your future success and must not be ignored. Good luck.