Traffic Tracking
Website traffic tracking and analysis is essential to the success of a website. And yet it's amazing how many website owners have little or no idea how many visitors come to their site; where they're from; and what they do when they're on the website.Website Traffic Analysis is all about dealing with following issues:
- How many people visit it each month?
- Where are they from?
- How are visitors finding your site?
- What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other sites, and other sources?
- What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site?
- What pages are frequented the most - what information are visitors most interested in?
- How do visitors navigate within your web site?
- Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is essential for making informed decisions that maximise the ROI of your web site investment.
Why is Traffic Tracking crucial for Website?
Given the importance from a marketing perspective of being able to track where traffic is coming from and what it does on site, Viz Marketing strongly recommends website owners ensure they have appropriate web traffic tracking and analysis systems in place.A lot of companies now have more than one site, sometimes these are linked together in some way. Traffic Tracking can tell you the inter-site traffic, so that you can understand why your clients jump from one site to another. It can then also tell you which page they visited.Sometimes it is important to know how many unique visitors you have had on a given page, but it is also important to see all your sites pages at a glance and determine the page impressions, which pages are more popular, or least.Traffic Tracking is crucial in analysing such issues.
With Traffic Tracking you can receive detailed weekly site statistics to make sure the flow of traffic is still coming to your site. Monthly you can receive all the data concerning your clients, what they did, where they came from, trace a clients path through to your sales pages. Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth – not all web traffic is welcome.
Measuring web traffic
Web traffic is measured to see the popularity of web sites and individual pages or sections within a site.Web traffic can be analysed by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server log file, an automatically-generated list of all the pages served. A hit is generated when any file is served. The page itself is considered a file, but images are also files, thus a page with 5 images could generate 6 hits (the 5 images and the page itself). A page view is generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site – a visitor will always generate at least one page view (the main page) but could generate many more.Tracking applications external to the web site can record traffic by inserting a small piece of HTML code in every page of the web site.Web traffic is also sometimes measured by packet sniffing and thus gaining random samples of traffic data from which to extrapolate information about web traffic as a whole across total Internet usage.
Parameters for monitoring Web-Traffic
- The number of visitors
- The average number of page views per visitor
- Average visit duration
- Average page duration
- Most requested pages – the most popular pages
- Busy times – the most popular viewing time of the site would show when would be the best time to do promotional campaigns and when would be the most ideal to perform maintenance
- Most requested entry pages – the entry page is the first page viewed by a visitor and shows which are the pages most attracting visitors
- Most requested exit pages – the most requested exit pages could help find bad pages, broken links or the exit pages may have a popular external link
- Top paths – a path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit, with the top paths identifying the way most customers go through the site
- Referrers- The host can track the (apparent) source of the links and determine which sites are generating the most traffic for a particular page.
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