You have a website but do you really know how it’s being used? If you are a blogger or are managing a site then looking at how users interact with your site can help you make decisions about your site. There are a number of ways to track your site’s traffic depending upon where you have your site hosted and how your site is built.
Some of the methods for tracking your site traffic are:
- Server based log analyzers - your hosting service’s servers keep data about the traffic to your site.
- Application based trackers - whether it’s a hosted service (such as blogspot.com) or installed on your own website’s hosting servers various applications either have tracking built in or allow you to install plugins that give you the ability to monitor traffic.
- External integration - some application based trackers rely on other-third party applications to get their data. But if your website is home grown you can use the server-based logs mentioned above our you can integrate third party services like Google Analytics as well.
- Other types of trackers - there are a variety of other ways to track your site including search engine performance (careful with those – you can get penalized by the search engines for using them), third-party specific trackers (such as Google’s Webmaster Tools) and so on. My general rule of thumb is if I can think of it someone’s probably already built it or tried to build it.
- Surveys - you can also utilize third-party survey systems to collect customized feedback about the user’s experience on your site. These can be simple and short or long and involved – but the net result is you get answers to questions that the methods above may hint at (or not tell you at all).
The first three items above overlap to some degree – particularly the 2nd and 3rd bullets. However, regardless of where your site is hosted or how your site is built you can and should be looking at your site’s traffic.
Within traffic-focused data there are some key areas to look at:
- Visits and Unique Visits - The difference between those two are simple. If a site has 100,000 visits one person can account for more than one of those visits. However a unique visit means that (for the time-frame being examined) a person will be counted only once regardless of how often they visited your site during that time.
- Pageviews and Unique Pageviews - Pageviews are quite simply how many times your pages have been displayed to a visitor. A unique page view is an aggregate of the pages visited by a unique visitor during a visit where the page is viewed one or more times. (yeah it confuses me too)
- Top Content and Content by Title - if your tracking can detail this you should be watching how often pages are being visited specifically. This will help you understand where you’re succeeding and where you have opportunity to learn or improve.
- Traffic Sources - where’s your traffic coming from? You can get a lot of details about who is linking to your content, what search engines they’re using and what keywords they used on that search engine to find you.
- Internal Search Behavior - if you have a built-in search engine on your site you can usually track how many searches are performed and what words they’re using to perform the search as well. This will help you identify trends and opportunities for new content (if they’re searching for something you don’t have) among other things.
- Event and Goal Tracking - some applications (like Google Analytics) allow you to track outbound clicks while some do not. The ability to track where people are going after visiting your site (based upon links you provide) can be beneficial for a variety of reason. These features also allow you to track paths through your site to specific actions such as purchasing products or downloading data/file types. The benefit to this is it can tell you if users are getting off-track in this process which means you need to fix something between points A and B.
The data you collect is only as useful as the volume of traffic (or submissions in the case of surveys) your site is having. Low volumes means you must look at data over longer periods of time. High volumes means you should be looking at your data more frequently. What is high and what is low volume? I’d love to give you a number but I don’t think that there’s a one-size fits all answer for every website. A successful site is not measured strictly by the number of visits or pageviews. It depends upon your goals, objectives and overall investment into the site. Your site succeeds when you meet your own goals and objectives. If those include monetary considerations then we can begin to assign numbers and percentages (based upon real-world assumptions about users in your market). But this is a subject for another more in-depth article. For now just keep in mind ‘more is better’ when it comes to analyzing data.
In the end there’s nothing more fun yet frightening as waching your traffic on a regular basis. It gives you a sense of what is going on (or not going on as the case may be) and helps you know if you’re going in a direction that meets your goals. Of course if you have a site that you monitor for fun it can be exciting just to see just how much your time and energy are being enjoyed by others.
