Website Traffic Analysis
Analyzing traffic and trends of website visitors

Analyzing website traffic

Information about how website visitors react to your content should be tracked and analyzed. By effective tracking and analysis you can tailor the material that you are presenting to best satisfy the needs of your target audience. It also provides a way to monitor the performance of your site. Your web hosting provider should have traffic data available for you to analyze. You can also use a free utility such as google analytics to perform an analysis of your website traffic.

The task of website traffic analysis is essential for the planning of new content and it is also a means of evaluating your website's effectiveness. The following checklist gives you a cursory view of what to look for and how to implement a comprehensive program of traffic analysis.

Website traffic statistics analysis

Page views

The quality of your website content is the primary factor that drives your page view count. An increasing number of page views is a good indicator of improvement in user interaction. Whereas a decrease in page views shows that your content is lacking in visitor appeal. In other words, the number of page views that your website receives indicates how positively or negatively your content is being received.

Visits

The visit metric indicates every time that a person enters your website. It is a direct measure of your website's raw traffic count. Return visits show the effectiveness of your content in drawing your visitors back. Quality website content is the primary factor that determines the health of both of these numbers. If the people visiting your site are impressed with what they find they will return and others will follow.

Top pages

Top pages is the number of visits to individual webpages. Certain pages will perform better than others which is an good indicator of visitor interest. Using this information you can see how effectively specific content is performing. Plan any new content based on the discoveries you make here.

Average number of page views per visitor

The more webpages that an individual visitor views the better your website is performing. If you provide content that is interesting they will delve deeper into your website viewing more pages. If the average number of page views is low you are not reaching your audience and they will leave.

Referring websites

The addresses of referring websites or links is a metric that tells you where your visitors are coming from. It indicates the point of origin of those people who are entering your site. Knowing where your visitors are coming from is important in helping you determine the effective outreach of your website.

Browsers

This information tells you what browser format is being used by the people entering your website. Knowing the types of browsers your visitors are using helps in the design of your webpages. Develop a webpage layout that will display properly in the most commonly used browsers.

Using your website statistics

By analyzing your website statistics you can determine how visitors are interacting with your website's content. Using this information you can implement changes that improves your website's health.

When you make changes you should wait a few weeks before you decide if your efforts have achieved the desired results. Positive results show that you are on the right track. Negative or unchanging results show that you have more work to do.

Test various layouts and tweak your website content constantly. Through website traffic analysis monitor the viewing trends of your website visitors. This practice will provide you with all the information you need for future redesigns and content improvements.

For more see: Website traffic analysis
By: Michael John Arnold