Take a Closer Look at Your Web Site Traffic

Many small business owners don't have the time or inclination to look at their web site traffic stats after the excitement of getting a web site has worn off. This is a BIG mistake! With a little time spent looking over your stats you might find some gaping holes in your site's structure, or well visited web pages that are not designed to help you close a sale.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web site traffic information that you then have to sort through. However, the information you receive from your hosting company’s numbers can be confusing to interpret if you don’t know how to apply it in relation to your particular business and web site. So let's look at some simple yet important web site traffic elements to gauge your site's success.

Let’s begin by studying the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly rate. These numbers are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see documented the greater you can assume your website is doing, but this is a misconceived perception. You must also look research the behavior of your visitors once they come to visit your web site to accurately register the effectiveness of your site.

Genuine or quality traffic to your site is sometimes commonly confused with the term "hits". Hits typically means the number of registered by the server. When you realize hits can simply mean the number of graphics seen on a page, you will get an idea of how overblown the notion of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has thirty graphics on it, the server records this as thirty hits, when actually we are really tracking a single visitor looking at a single page on your site. Therefore, you can assume hits are not helpful when analyzing your website traffic.

Your intention is to use the web site traffic numbers to find out how well, or how poorly, your site is working for your visitors. One way to evaluate this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is typically brief, it usually shows an underlying situation. Then the challenge is to find out what that situation is.

It's also important to remember that the more people that visit your web site, the more accurate your results will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can throw your analysis.

In my next post I'll be looking at a few other aspects of your web site traffic stats that will alert you to your web site's overall performance and whether it really is as good or bad as you think.