Analyzing Website Statistics to increase site traffic

by admin - April 7, 2009 - 0 comments || tags:How to Increase Traffic

Close analyzing of website statistics log and making suitable adjustments to site content and layout can have major impact on the site traffic and consequently on monetization of the site. A good hosting provider also ensures to install a special software installed on his server that offers you website log in easy to analyze format and giving all necessary details as as to how many people are visiting the website, where the visitors are coming from, where they are entering and exiting the website, the average number of page views per visit, and many more interesting facts.

Effective analyzing of these statistics can help you understand the effectiveness of your content and help you understand the demographic percentage of visitors, popular articles or content and on which search terms can help you get better traffic.

I must add that for a detailed analysis, quite often you might need additional software, other than the usual one provider by the hosting provider.

Before continuing further, let’s first understand “hits”. “Hit” is a request made to your server. Requests for images and other associated files associated with a page are also counted as hits, thus even a single page view could be reported as multiple hits by web log software. Many control panel software have minimized this extra counting, still it may not be reliable count to know how many people have visited the website. Also a good web log analyzer can differentiate the visit of a human visit and that of a “bot”. You may do well to study C-panel software provided by the hosting provider before selecting one. A cheaper one may not be the best one.

Unique visitors reported by the web log presents better measure of website traffic. Of course, the uprising trend in increase in visitors is a better idea and indicator of growing popularity of the site.

Another good point to watch for in weblog is Entry Page Statistics. It helps you understand and know the origin of traffic for your site. Later on as the site grows; the more traffic that enters your site through link page rather than home page, the better it would be. It also indicates the growing link popularity of your site.

As a webmaster, you must study the bounce rate from your weblog. It shows, how many people leave your site immediately as they enter. It shows that though they landed on your site, they did not get what they were looking for. A bounce rate higher than 40% shows some weakness in the site, may be layout, or navigation, or poor content or just the looks and feel of it.

Do study Exit Page Statistics for these would tell you which page is responsible for highest number of exits from the website. You don’t need to be unduly alarmed by this, as visitors, have to leave the web site any how, but would give you a good food for thought to know the page at which visitors tend to lose their further interest.

Origin of Traffic: The statistics would also help you know the source of traffic as search engine, a web site etc.

You would also be able to know various keywords that brought the visitor to your site. Quite often you would see you don’t have sufficient content for that keyword. Now when you know that your site is ranking high on that keyword, why not strengthen your site further on that keyword.

Miscellaneous: Weblog can also help you understand few areas that you might need to work or improve upon. You must see various browsers being used by your visitor and see if your site needs to be adjusted for better viewing in that browser.

You would also be able to know the country of origin of your visitor. Here I would like a word of caution, many weblog creating software are not able to record the country correctly from the IP address of the visitor. Knowing the countries of your visitor would help you in planning ad campaign or if you use PPC program, you can chose the country where to display the ads.

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