Understanding Your Web Site Traffic

Probably the second most popular question we receive is:

"Why am I getting all these Hits and not making any sales".

(The first being: "Why aren't I getting any traffic at all" which
is another article completely.)

The problem with that first question is it usually stems from a
comprehension problem with the terminology in question. It is
important to first understand the language involved in tracking web
site traffic, Then we can look at interpreting all the data and
finally decide how to benefit from this sometimes overwhelming
mass of data.

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Tracking Traffic
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Every visit to your web site is recorded in a specific format in
your access logs that can be analyzed and reduced into graphical
or table format. Your host should provide this raw information
for free that you can download and analyze yourself, if not it is
time to change!

If you are lucky your hosting company even provides some kind of
data already processed by software like WebTrends, http-analyze,
Analog, Urchin or other access log analyzers that you can review
at a glance.

Otherwise the other option is to insert "Tracking Code" into your
web page, examples of this would be WebTrends Live or Extreme
Tracking, both are simply a script that run on your page to
provide tracking information. Unfortunately this second method is
less accurate as depending on where the script is located on your
page it will affect both the accuracy of the information as well
as increase your page download time.

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Terminology
=============

Once you have all the data you need to get the terms straight:

Hits:

Contrary to popular belief a "Hit" is not a single visit. A "Hit"
to a web site is actually defined as:

"Any response from the server on behalf of a request sent from a
browser. This includes any response from the server, not only
text files or documents. "

Here is an example to make that a little clearer. If, for
example, an HTML page has ten images on it, the server generates
eleven hits if this page is requested: one hit for the HTML page
itself and ten hits for the ten embedded images.

As you can see if you are basing your traffic numbers on hits you
will be sorely misled if just one page can multiply the numbers
by 11 (or more depending on your use of graphics!).

So what is a more accurate unit of measure?

Pageviews:

Another popular unit of measure is Pageviews. This one is easier
to grasp, it is defined as follows:

"Pageviews are all files which either have a text file suffix
(.html, .text) or which are directory index files. This number
allows to estimate the number of "real" documents transmitted by
your server. If defined correctly, the analyzer rates text files
(documents) as pageviews. Those pageviews do not include images,
CGI scripts, Java applets or any other HTML objects except all
files ending with one of the pre-defined pageview suffixes, such
as .html or .text. "

Basically that is lots of words to let you know it is how many
"pages" were "viewed" from your web site.

Of course some visitors will bounce off your index page while
others may explore your entire site so this doesn't really give
us an accurate idea of exactly how many visitors we have had.

Sessions:

Finally! Something more tangible:

"This is the number of unique hosts accessing the server during a
given time-window."

Hosts are visitors, either human or automated (spiders, robots,
etc...) and the only real important thing to note is that the
"given time-window" will vary from one software to another. As an
example the http-analyze I use is set to one day while WebTrends
defaults to every 20 minutes so that can have a dramatic effect
on your end result.

The key is to stay consistent, use the same criteria to
accurately track your traffic.

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Data Overload
===============

What's all that other stuff? Referrers, URLs, Browsers, etc...

Rather than keep you captive all day I'll save that for another
article, if you are really hungry for more information you can
find some more details here.


The really important info is the Referrers, that tells you
exactly where your visitors are coming from!

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Tracking Growth
================

If you are serious about growing your web site traffic you need
to faithfully track it at least monthly to be able to evaluate
your traffic, find out where it is coming from and continue to
grow the numbers.

As always this article feels much too short to me (possibly much
too long to you) :-). More in depth information is available to
site subscribers on our newly improved Marketing Insiders web site.

Happy Marketing!

Questions?
Send me an email: mike@surf22.com

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