Hosting - Understanding Your Website Traffic

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You own a website, and it gets a lot of traffic. But you don’t get a lot of visitors buying your products or services. Or maybe you don’t get a lot of traffic, and you’re wondering why. Well, you’re not alone, and fortunately there is something you can do about it.

Getting plenty of traffic to your website is all well and good, but if you don’t know more than the fact that you’re apparently getting lots of visitors, that’s not going to help you. You need to analyze the traffic that your website is getting. In fact, if you want to improve the marketing for your website, analyzing its traffic is not just important, it’s vital.

By analyzing your website’s traffic, you can tell where your visitors are coming from. Are they visiting you after doing a search at Google, or are you getting more referrals through people mentioning your sites in forums or their blogs? What kind of browsers are they using? And how are they using your website? Are they accessing all the files you want them to look at?

I think you can see how this kind of information can help you to improve your marketing efforts. If you’re getting most of your visitors from the search engines, then you’ll know that it’s important to keep up with the SEO on your site. If you’re getting a respectable number of visitors to your site from online forums or blogs, maybe you need to make sure you start visiting those places online, or keep visiting them regularly.

If some of your visitors are showing up from clicking on Google ads on another site, that’s valuable information; it lets you know your marketing campaign is working. And if they’re a content-focused site, who knows? You might be able to write an article for them or offer to be the subject of an interview, and that’s free publicity for you.

Defining Some Traffic-Related Terms

If you want to analyze your website traffic, there are certain terms you need to know. They may sound like obvious terms -- “visit,” for example -- but their meanings often aren’t quite that simple. I’ll be defining some of the most commonly used words in this section.

A “visit” encompasses all of the requests that a single, specific user makes to your website during a particular period of time. If a certain amount of time (like an hour) goes by without the visitor accessing your website again, that visit is ended. This means that a visitor who flips back and forth between your site and, say, a competitor’s website to do comparison shopping, is really only visiting your site once.

For purposes of analyzing your website traffic, visitors can be tracked. Specific visitors can be identified in a number of ways. A “cookie” is a small data file that can be written to a visitor’s hard drive by a web server, for purposes of identifying that visitor. Many cookies last only for the length of a visit; others are more permanent, and save visitors the trouble of re-entering their personal information every time they want to make a purchase at your site. Visitors can also be identified by their username (if they have to log into your site or otherwise have an account with you) or by their IP addresses.

A “hit” is one term that is often confused. It happens when a file request is made to your server. Do not confuse a file with a web page. One web page can be made up of many files, including graphic files, audio files, JavaScript files, and more. So a single page might account for many hits when a visitor tries to view it.

When you want to talk about a web page as a whole, you want to use the term “page view” or “impression.” This is what you need to count when you want to find out how many times a web page is, well, viewed.

A plain count of page views could give you an inflated idea of how many visitors are actually checking out your website. So you also need to check for unique views. A “unique view” of a web page is a page view by a unique visitor within 24 hours. So the same visitor could view the same page multiple times, but they all only count as one view.

If you want to know where your visitors are coming from, you want to look at your referrers. A “referrer” is a web page that links to your site. It could be linking to your site for any reason; the point is, somebody followed the link and ended up at your site. If you’re getting visitors from search engines, looking at the referrers could tell you what keywords they used to find you…and that’s very valuable information for whoever does your site’s search engine optimization.

Finally, I’m going to mention one last term: user agent. Usually, a “user agent” is the same thing as a web browser. It’s the software a visitor uses to access your website. But it isn’t always a web browser; when search engines send spiders to index your site, they don’t use web browsers (a fact which black hat SEOs sometimes take advantage of, but that topic is beyond the scope of this article). Sometimes a script is used – and sometimes it’s overused to block other visitors from accessing your site, as in denial-of-service attacks. In broad outline, if you can tell what kind of user agent is accessing your site, you can tell what’s happening to your site – whether it’s getting normal traffic, being indexed by the search engines, under attack, or even seeing some unusual but normal use (i.e. the software many bidders use on eBay that allows them to “snipe” the winning bid).

Tracking Your Visitors

There are a number of ways to track the visitors to your website. Some are better than others. Take counters, for instance. A lot of people use them. You've no doubt seen websites that proudly inform you on the home page that you're the 15,345th visitor. It may sound impressive, but it doesn't exactly look very professional. Besides, whoever designs the page can set it up so that the number goes up by more than one for every visitor. If you're serious about understanding and analyzing your website's traffic, I would not recommend the use of counters.

Another way to count the visitors on your website is through tracking software. This kind of software actually follows a visitor as he or she travels through your website. And you can get a lot more information from tracking software. It can give you visitor statistics broken down by date, time, browser, page(s) viewed, and lots of other values. There is a down side, though: if you're using free tracking software, you may have to place a button or graphic on your site in exchange for the service. As with a counter, that looks unprofessional.

You can also find web traffic analysis software. This is more sophisticated than simple tracking software. It analyzes your server logs and builds reports based on what it finds. The quality of these reports varies with the software you use. Prices range from free to several hundred dollars and more. Google Analytics is an example of this kind of web traffic analysis offered as a service. It is free, but currently being offered by invitation only (though you can request an invitation). If you'd rather not spend lots of time poring over the raw data in your ISP's log files, this could be the way to go.

Getting the Raw Data

If you really want to get your hands on a lot of data, and you don't want to be bothered with extra software or services, you might be better off getting the log files from your ISP. These contain records of every single hit on your website. From these records you can find out much the same kind of information you can get from really good tracking software. Want to know where your visitors are coming from? What pages they're visiting? How long they stay? What browsers they're using? It's all there. Your hosting company may or may not be obligated to give you access to these records; it's something to look for whenever you sign up with a web host, though, for obvious reasons.

Not all log files are the same. The four main ones are access, referrer, error, and agent. These tell you different things. All of them give you useful information, however.

An access log gives you information related to who visited your site, where they went on your site, what they looked at, and how long they stayed. You definitely want this information. Are people looking at the hot new promotion you set up, or are they more interested in something else? Are prospective buyers getting to a certain point in the purchase process, then bailing? You can find out by going over your access log.

A referrer log tells you where your visitors came from to look at your site. This is particularly helpful when your visitors come from search engines, because it will also tell you what keywords they entered. In this way, you can find out whether the search engine optimization you've done on your site has been successful.

An agent log lets you know what browser and OS your visitors used to view your site. That might not seem to be immediately useful information, but it can give your designers a clue. If you only care how your website looks and works in Internet Explorer, and you're seeing an upsurge of visitors using FireFox, guess what? You might want to change your mind about that. You could even be losing sales because certain features of your site only work with certain browsers.

Finally, an error log lets you know what errors the server generated and sent back to the client. This information can tell you how visitors are using (or trying to use) your website.

To sum up, you need to be able to see more than just that a lot of web surfers are visiting your website. Understanding your website's traffic can help you redesign your site (or at least give it a bit of a facelift) by giving you a handle on which pages are popular and which ones aren't. It can tell you who is visiting your website and where they're coming from, so you can see if your SEO campaign is successful. It can tell you what browsers to take into consideration when you design your web pages. In short, it can tell you what is and isn't working as far as boosting both your website's traffic and its conversions.


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