Analytics: A Table For Your Traffic Gauging Feast

So you’ve launched your website and you’re happy with the content, the design, and with its placement in cyberspace. Now, it’s time to track your traffic. How many people visit your site each month? Where are they coming from? What do you need to know to be an informed analyzer so you can beef up your site traffic? And what tools can help you along the way? Ladies and gentlemen, sit back, relax, and enjoy the following answers to all these questions.

Why You Should Know Your Dinner Guests

Knowing where your visitors are coming from and knowing where they go on your site are the two most important pieces of acquisition arsenal you can obtain. This is because on one hand, knowing where people are coming from will help you focus your offsite advertising and marketing plans. On the other hand, and knowing how visitors navigate within your site will help you gauge what pages work and which ones need to be revamped. Maybe you have important content that would be most appealing to your visitors but it is difficult to get to due to poor design choices and hence no one is going to that page. You can use metrics to figure out what pages are most popular. That is the best way to understand what type of content and design works and will guide the future development plans for your site. The main goal is to reduce what are know as the dreaded “bottlenecks,” pages of your site where visitors exit before they reach your purchase or sign up page.

Know the Ingredients

First, acquaint or reacquaint yourself- as the case may be- with the terminology so that you know what you are actually analyzing. If you know that unique visits is distinct from unique visitors, for instance, you will have a better grasp of what figures to use for reporting purposes, setting advertising rates, and a host of other options specific to your company’s needs. Learn what an entry point means and where people travel to once on your site. Some tools, like Webalizer, allow you to see what URL people visited before coming to your site. This is an excellent way to learn more about your audience and perhaps point you towards potential advertising or link exchange opportunities.

Know the Recipe

Analytics tools can be tricky. The most important research you can do is to find out how each metrics system calculates its findings. For instance, the company I work for employs several reporting tools to track traffic to the site. When we first started using these tools, we were very confused. Google Analytics told us a very different figure for unique visitors than Webalizer did. In fact, Google’s figures were just about half that of Webalizer! After further investigation, we learned that Webalizer was picking up on traffic behind our paywall where Google was unable to track. Some worthy reporting tools that you should check out include AWstats and WWWstats. AWstats presents their data in an easy-to-digest format and tells us things like usage by the hour and a breakdown of what countries our visitors are from. WWWstats presents the data in a pretty raw format, but allows you to track things like transfers by client domain and transfers by URL or section. Both of these services provide fairly reliable information.

Google Analytics is an extensive – and free! - program that can help you measure just about anything on your site. This includes conversion tracking, which allows you to follow a visitor from the point of entry on your site to each subsequent page that he/she visits. This is an outstanding way of gauging your site’s navigability index and where work needs to be done to maximize the user experience (and attract more traffic to places on the site where you want visitors most). You can also track how your keywords are performing on the major search engines. Google’s reporting tools, though respectable, can be confusing to use. It is not entirely clear how to access certain tools and, although they offer video instruction for some of their services, if you have specific problems or questions, an actual customer service person is difficult to nearly impossible to contact.

Crazyegg.com is another lesser known tool for tracking your traffic. Though there is a fee to participate, you can try their services for free. They offer a full service program for setting up, deploying and tracking tests, advice on how to properly track click-throughs, live reports, and easy-to-read results. Hey, you have nothing to lose so it’s worth trying a free test. Be sure to also check out these other good sites that offer reporting and analysis for your traffic: Clicktracks.com, Fireclick.com, NetTracker.com, and WedTrends.com.

Taste the Results

Perhaps the best way to gauge your traffic more accurately is to look at several different reporting tools and make an educated guess. More likely than not, the actual number of visitors to your site- much like the truth between the claims made of two feuding parties- will lie somewhere in between.

Remember, the web is still in its infancy in many ways and there is no one, overarching, epistemologically respectable reporting tool currently available that beats out all the rest. The existing tools may change as our understanding of the web becomes more comprehensible or if sites become standardized or regulated in some way. But for now, use the tools I’ve recommended coupled with your best judgment and you will be on your way to making your site the best it can be.