How to Analyze Website Traffic

By: Mike Grafos

Analyzing your web site's traffic data can be the best thing to do for many reasons. But before you start making full use of the information, you have to understand how to interpret.

Most hosts are providing some web traffic information that you can watch and interpret. Let's begin by looking at the basics - the average visitors per day, week and month.

These figures are an accurate measure of the website's popularity. The more traffic you can see the better you can assume that your website is doing, but this is generalization. You have to also look at the behavior of the visitors once they come to the website to measure the effectiveness of the website.

Your aim is to use the website traffic statistics to find out how well the site is working for the visitor. One way to find out is to check how long on average a visitor spends on the site. If time spent is a bit low, it usually indicates a problem. Then the ultimate goal is to figure out what the problem is and try to fix it. You can try to check using google analytics and find how much time each visitor stays on every particular page and try to raise that average starting from the page with the fewer time.

It could be that the keywords bringing the wrong type of visitors to the website so when someone comes, he/she expected to see something else, or that the graphics are a bit confusing, causing the visitor to exit at once. Use the powerful knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on the site to spot specific problems.

Furthermore, website traffic stats can help to determine effective and ineffective areas of a website. If you have a page that you think that is important, but visitors are exiting it at once, that page needs your attention. You could consider improving the links to this page by making links more noticeable, or you could improve the looks of that page or the ease that a visitors can access the essential information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you find out that visitors are staying for a lot of time on webpages that you think are less important, you might want to consider moving some of the sales copy and marketing focus material to that specific page.

As you can clearly see, statistics will reveal very vital information about the effectiveness of every page, and visitor habits/motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketer.

After analyzing visitor statistics, it's time to turn to the keywords and phrases. Notice if some keywords are directing a specific kind of visitor to your site. You'll find out soon that the more targeted information a visitor finds at the site using a search query, the better your stats will become, thus the more valuable that keyword will be.

However, if you find out that a big percentage of visitors are being led to your site with a different keyword than your actual content, that keyword needs to be adjusted. Keywords are vital to bringing high quality visitors to the site who are willing to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords that visitors are using to find the site will give you a vital understanding of the visitor's needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website just by typing in your company name, it's a good sign of achieving a good level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of success.

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