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Understanding Site Traffic

Whether or not you regularly check traffic to your web site, a wealth of data is being gathered and stored in files that you can download and examine whenever you wish. You can also generate your own data or contract with a web traffic analyst to do it for you. Specialists who analyze web traffic data are in a specialized field called web analytics.

Servers have always recorded traffic information in structures called log files. In particular, they store two metrics called page views and visits. Many people try to use these measures to analyze their traffic, but they're not as useful as they once were.

Search engine spiders and server proxies have made it difficult to come to grips with a much more important set of metrics called unique visitors. In many cases, a visitor to your site can leave and re-enter many times, so the data might appear to be telling you that you have thousands of visitors when in fact you have only a few.

Conversely, because servers get their information from the IP addresses from which visitors originate, the web proxies that are in common use to provide security for many corporate networks channel many users through a single IP address. This means that your logfiles might show fewer unique visitors than you actually have.

This is not to say that all the data are useless, but you can't perform a good analysis of your data unless you understand these limitations.

Page Tagging To the Rescue
By the mid-1990s, web site developers were ready for more accurate data about the traffic to their sites. Web counters were invented to track the number of visitors to specific pages. You probably saw counters on web pages as you browsed, but now they're mostly invisible.

Page tagging doesn't just count the number of times a particular page is downloaded. It can also record information such as the amount of money spent on an e-commerce site. Page tagging services also manage cookies. While cookies have been the subject of controversy in the last few years, they're not the electronic spies that many people think they are. Nevertheless, shopping carts designed to work with cookies are useless unless your potential customer is willing to turn the cookie blocker off.

Page Tagging Advantages and Disadvantages
Since servers always produce logfiles and they're free, having to pay a third party to install page tagging is an expense for newcomers to e-commerce. Also, since page tagging depends on the customer's server allowing you access, page tagging may not give you reliable data. Even if you purchase web tagging services, logfiles are still of great use to you as they provide information on keyword use and are invaluable for search engine optimization.

Page tagging, though, can be customized to gather the data you need most. For an e-commerce site, this includes information about the visitor's viewing and spending habits.

If you contract your web analytics to a third party, chances are they'll use both the logfiles and page tagging to gather data. Web analytics specialists sometimes use proprietary software to gather and analyze your data. The more pages you have, the higher the cost of analytics. The analysis of a site with fewer than 100,000 page views a month can cost as little as $15 to $20 a month. Conversely, if you attract more than a million page views a month, your analytics can cost over $100 a month.

Gathering the Data
You have to learn quite a lot about page views, visitors, click-throughs and impressions to be able to identify trends and make good decisions based on your web site traffic data. Even when a third party helps you with gathering and analyzing the information, how you apply the conclusions is up to you.

Here are some types of data that can be extracted for you from logfiles and page tags:

• page views, including which pages, when they were downloaded and how long they were kept
• the most popular downloads (files) and the most requested pages
• the number of visitors to your site, which page they arrived at, which page they left from and how many times they visited each page
• the search engine from which a visitor originated
• keywords used in the search engine that led to your site
• the most accessed directories
• the URL of sites from which visitors clicked to reach your site
• which visitors originated from e-mails
• which visitors arrived from newsgroups, blogs or forums
• the length of time a visitor spent on your site and on each page
• the depth of visits (clicking through to lower levels).

Deriving Meaning from Trends
The trends of interest to online business owners have to do with customer behaviors (visiting, staying and buying), how much organic (natural) traffic is finding its way to your site and how much paid traffic is coming your way. If you've paid an SEO (search engine optimization) specialist to optimize your site, you'll want to calculate your return on investment by checking out which keywords generated the traffic, if any.

Customer Trends
The key questions you should address when looking at customer traffic are those relating sales to visits.
If you'd just opened a bricks-and-mortar store and wanted to know how well your sales were going, you might track how many visitors entered your store and what percentage of them left only after purchasing something. Visitors might be attracted to a clever display or trendy music wafting from your storefront. On the other hand, your store may be quiet, but almost everyone who visits is there to purchase something.

Your web site is very much your virtual storefront. You might notice a lot of traffic, but disappointing sales at first. You might be interested in return traffic — how many people who visited the site today had been here before? Did they return to buy something or were they really just comparison shopping and doing their buying at a competitor's site? Did they find lower prices elsewhere for the same products?

Some of your traffic figures might look quite good, in that visitors are going from page to page and back again, like shoppers browsing a store. Notice where they typically exit. Are they lost and confused and giving up in frustration, or do they eventually make their way to the checkout area? Your goal is to have as many exits after paid checkout as possible. If a significant percentage exit at the home page, you have a problem with that page. You could be attracting the wrong demographic, for example.

You can also check the timing of visits. If your audience includes working professionals, are they visiting during work hours or before and after work? This information can guide what type of customer service you offer. If you can't have a 24/7 help line, you might set up autoresponders to make sure no e-mail goes unanswered in the evening and during the night. If your traffic bulges around 3 p.m. every weekday, you may hypothesize that many of your visitors are kids and/or teenagers who are just getting home from school.

Timing information can also give you a clue about visitors from other time zones and countries. Again, if you're getting interest from afar, you might design customer service, language options and shipping options accordingly. Looking at the data on popular pages will help you identify popular products. Product pages that have a low number of visitors may be problematic: either you have to take action to give them some life or consider dropping the items from your product line.

Paid Traffic
You've invested time and money in search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads or banner, affiliate and associate programs, newsletters, e-mail campaigns and memberships in newsgroups or forums. Luckily, you can check your traffic figures to see which of your efforts has brought you the most traffic, since the data can be set up to differentiate the origin of a visitor from:

• a specific search engine
• a specific site with URL
• a specific e-mail
• newsgroups, forums, blogs and other public services
• the exact keywords that were used in a search engine to locate a particular page.

Since the data can also reveal the path taken through your site, you can reverse the path and find out exactly where each paying customer found out about you. Now that's something you can't do at the mall!

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