Online Marketing

Web Traffic Stats Are Important

Web Traffic Stats Are Important

by Jeff Alderson

Learning how to read web traffic analysis reports can be very important for webmasters to do for a number of reasons. Learning how to interpret these reports correctly can be a bit tricky though.

This data is available from most web hosting companies. They will provide you with a lot of information that can be pretty overwhelming to decipher at first. It doesn’t hurt to understand how to make it apply to the business and website at hand. The first thing to look at is the average number of visitors that land on your website. Take a look at the daily, weekly and monthly figures.

These numbers tend to be the most accurate in regard to a particular site’s activity level. Be careful not to read too much into the traffic numbers without delving deeper. While it might seem as if the more visitors who go to a site, the better the site is doing, it’s not always true. You need to know what visitors do once they get to a site. This is the real measure of effectiveness.

A lot of people confuse the actual hits with the quality of traffic. In reality, hits just describe the number of requests for information a server gets. This can break down to nothing more than the number of images on a page. If, for example, you have 5 images on a page, a single visit can register as five hits. Considering this, hits alone aren’t the only thing to pay attention to in analyzing traffic.

These numbers can become a bit more accurate with the higher the traffic numbers become. The lower the numbers for traffic, the more skewed the numbers will likely be.

The key is taking the stats and using them to determine how effective a site is. One number to focus on is the length of time visitors stay on a site. If they don’t stay long, there could be a problem.

It is very possible that keywords have been selected poorly to attract the right type of visitor to the site. The layout and design might be the issue, too. If it’s too confusing or hard to grasp, visitors will likely leave pretty quickly. Time spent averages can help pinpoint problems. If something is tweaked, this same number can be used to see if the effort improved the issue.

Traffic stats are also useful for figuring out if certain areas on a site are working as they should. If visitors leave a page too quickly that you think is important, it might be time to improve that page or its incoming links. This works in the converse, too. If a page is getting more attention than you think it deserves, maybe shuffling its content with more important material will help since visitors seem to go there anyway.

Learning to read stats and decipher them can be important for all sites. The practice is especially important for those who want to make money from their efforts. Using these numbers can really pay off in regard to tweaking a site to its optimum potential.

Stats can also be useful in regard to exit pages. Although you might have designed exit pages, like order forms, others will show up as exit points, too. Don’t panic. This is normal. If a certain pages shows up too much, however, it’s probably time to tweak that page.

Once visitor stats have been closely examined, the next thing to look at is keywords. See which keywords are working to bring in specific kinds of traffic. The more focused and targeted the visitors, the better. If a particular keyword is bringing in traffic that fills out forms, buys or so on, that keyword is very important to your site.

Should a lot of visitors arrive by way of weak keywords that are not part of the theme, it is time to get rid of these keywords on your site. Since these visitors are not likely to buy or act because the theme doesn’t fit your need, focusing efforts on these keywords can be a waste of time.

When it comes to figuring out a site’s effectiveness, stats are very helpful. They can also point out weak spots and assist in fixing them. Those who read stats with care can really supercharge their sites and revenue.

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