All traffic-reporting software packages cover the basics... average number of visits, visitors, and pages viewed per day, as well as the totals on a per-month basis. Here’s what those terms mean...
• Visits -- the number of visits to your site• Visitors -- the number of different people who visit your site (ex., a visitor could account for 10 visits)
• Page Views -- the number of pages viewed by all the visitors during all the visits. A single visitor might view only one page... or twenty.
You have a question?Question…“What about hits? Everyone talks about hits!”
Great question! Short answer... forget hits. A hit is simply a line in your site’s log file. If a page has 3 graphics on it, that’s 4 hits (1 for the HTML page itself, plus 3 for the graphics). But if that same page has 100 graphics on it, that’s 101 hits!
See why the number of hits is a useless stat?
Question…“Yes, but why does everyone quote hits then?”
Answer… Two reasons -- either people don’t understand the term, or they understand it and use hits because it sounds bigger! In any event, “hits” is a useless thing to measure.
By comparing your monthly “big picture” data, you should be able to see steady growth in your site’s overall traffic. If not, the “patient” needs a good dose of traffic-building medicine (luckily, that medicine is nearby... just above, actually!). Ongoing traffic-building is a good idea even if traffic is building nicely -- you can never have too much!
Now that you have the big picture, it’s time to delve inside and pull out some important information...• Daily statistics -- visits, visitors and page views must be reported on a day-byday basis, in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the total (ex., percent of total visitors). If you do a special traffic promotion on a certain day (ex., run an ad in an e-zine), this is an easy way to gauge the response.
• Most popular pages -- your page view stats must be delivered on a per-page basis, with the page generating the most page views reported first. By understanding which pages are most popular, you understand better the needs of your visitors. Correlate this with your link-tracking data (more on this below) to make sure that your most popular pages properly PREsell your service, or alternatively, “get the click” to your income-generating programs. Also, use this data to get a better feel for what your market wants... and, just as important, what it does not want.
• Most popular entry pages -- same as the previous section, except that this specifically tells you which pages are the most popular entry pages. A page counts as an entry page when it starts a visit. Correlate this with how people find you (referrers and keywords, discussed just below), and you have a wealth of insight into how your site is being discovered, and what people want. Use these conclusions to present your service from a different perspective or use them as ideas for other related, profitable areas for content development.
• Most frequent exit pages -- these are the pages from which people leave your site. Some people look upon high numbers for a given page as “bad.” But you have to correlate this with other data... If a “high entry” page is also a “high exit” page, then that’s not really a surprise. If a “high exit” page is also generating tons of links out to your income-generating programs for you, or the page with your contact information, that’s not so bad either, is it?
• Referrer URLs -- this tells you where your traffic is coming from... Search Engines, other Web sites from link exchanges, etc., etc. Extremely useful info!• Keyword search -- which keywords are people entering into engines to find you? That’s what this super-valuable data tells you!
Taken together, referrer page and keyword search data tell you where and how your visitors find you, which gives you a base to build even more traffic-building ideas!
As you can see, traffic analysis is actually a pretty simple task... when you know what you’re looking for, and how to turn data into information.
Site Build It! provides you with exactly these traffic stats. No need to install or configure any software. No need to figure out what's important. SBI! provides everything a good content site needs to know... with one simple click from you.
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Traffic analysis is the base. It tells you what you need to know about quantities of visits, visitors, and page views. It shows you where visitors come from (if via the Web) and what words they used to find you at the Search Engines.
But you need more. Now that you understand traffic flow, you need to be able to see exactly what’s working in the two bottom-line areas that matter most...1) How you spend your traffic-building time and money -- what’s working, and what’s not. Spend only on the techniques that bear fruit.
2) How you make your money -- gear your content more and more towards what gets your visitor to contact you about your service, subscribe to your e-zine, or get the click to a merchant partner…
… because that’s what builds your income.
So how do we get this information? Through two forms of analysis that are specialized for content sites like yours...• Click IN Analysis
and…
• Click Through Analysis
Before we go further, let’s talk about two different kinds of links...
• off-site links that bring traffic in to you
• on-site links that send traffic out.
Off-site links do not appear on your Web site. People will not actually click upon these links while they are on your site. Rather, your potential visitors see these links off of your site... in e-zine ads, or offline print ads, in flyers that you distribute at trade or hobby conventions, or in your sig file (at the end of your email). And they’ll use these links to come into your site.
Since you spend time and/or money on these traffic-building activities, you need a way to measure this, to track which off-site promotions are working, and which are not. Once you know which of your expense-generating activities work and which ones don’t... you know where to spend your promotional time and money! And where to stop! You build upon your successes and fix your weaknesses.
Let’s contrast that with on-site links...On-site links appear on your site, and send visitors out of that page. These links all go to income-generating sites (merchant-partners via affiliate programs, or your own online stores or to the page with your contact form). In other words, on-site links generate income.
So how do we track these two kinds of links?... It all boils down to this. We track how to best spend our traffic-building time and money via Click IN Analysis. We track what’s generating income by Click Through Analysis.
