Article : More of What You Need to Know About Your Website Traffic is Contained

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Their is an old Saying it goes something like this 'Figures Lie and Liars figures. While it is true that you can skew Statistics anyway you want, it is also true that with properly gathered statistics you can learn a great deal about your web site traffic if you know what to look for.

In a previous Article 'All You Need to Know About Your Website Traffic is Contained in 5 Key Stats' I discussed AWStats and 5 key areas related to Search Engine, Back Links and Reciprocal Links. In this article we will learn how to use a few more Statistics from AWStats.

Most Web Hosts will provide you with a Cpanel, where you can create E-mail Accounts, Upload Web Pages and check your stats. Most of the Cpanel's are very similar if not identical to the one my Hosts uses.

When it is time to check my web page traffic statistics I click on Log and then Web/FTP Stats and finally AWStats. I am now presented with a List of Stats to look at. This Article will discuss

   1. Navigation: Full list
   2. Navigation: Entry
   3. Navigation: Exit

1 - Navigation: Full list

This will list all of your web pages that were visited and how many times they were visited. If you have web pages about sports and you notice that your golf pages were visited the most and your Bowling pages are visited least. You may want to think about either how to make a bigger profit by having more golf pages. You may also want to see what you can do to make your bowling pages more popular.

2 - Navigation: Entry

This is a very important stat. It will tell which was the first web page each visitor saw. You should look for patterns. If you have been trying very hard to send traffic to your buckwheat pillow pages is it working? Are you surprised to learn that your loan page is doing well but your life insurance page isn't? You may want to look at your pages that are performing well and see if you notice patterns that you can apply to other pages.

3 - Navigation: Exit This stat tells you which was the last page each visitor saw. A good way to use this page is to do split testing. You have 10 pages about golf. You want to send your golf page visitors to a golf vacation-planning page. By creating 2 different golf vacation planning pages you can see which method link methods works best.



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Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 When he Built an Organization of over 100,000 Members

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That's an interesting article, especially for those who are not familliar with statistic programs.

I would like to add some things.

1) Fake traffic

With the term fake traffic I mean traffic that is not generated by humans who surf the web, but from programs. These programs can be search engine robots, which in most cases are traced by the statistics programs and are not counted in the main statistics, but there are also some referer spam bots. This is a new weapon of spammers, and it is a big problem. A program visits your site sending the headers that a normal browser would send, plus a referer header with their site on them. That way they trick search engines (because a lot of statistic reports are indexed there) but they also create a false image of your statistics and even a big overhead on the server ( for instance before a month we've got 1500 referer spam requests in only one hour and the server was going too slow!) A solution to this problem is this script.

2) Time your users spend in the site.

You should watch that because it indicates how good is the site for the users.

3) Browsers.

This is good to watch because it can tell you what browsers you should download and check if your site looks ok with.

4) 404 errors.

That is the 'debugger' of your site. Looking to this you can see what dead links pages you have inside your site.

5) Keywords.

Keywords that use the visitors that visit you from search engines. This is good for testing your search engine optimization techniques, and even get to know how the search engines evaluate your html.

6) Referers.

Allways check this and visit your referers in order to know how they are linking to you, what comments come with your link etc.

Nice article. I often find myself looking at my traffic stats and analyzing how my visitors have gotten to my site. I think the more you know about your visitors the more you can do to receive more and keep them coming back.

Interesting article, some good techniques to try out.

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