Web site statistics tools to analyze web site traffic to know your visitors
Using a web site statistics tool is an absolute must for effective website promotion and Internet marketing. A reliable traffic analysis tool is essential to know website statistics such as total hits, number of visitors coming to your website, visitor origin, and other important visitor information.
To understand how web site statistics can help your website, we have explained some important terms that you will come across while analyzing your statistics and how you may use them to understand your traffic.
- Visitor/Unique: A visitor is a unique person that visits your website. Though he/she may browse through various pages in your site, he/she will be counted as only one person. E.g. After reading this article you may choose to click on some of our other articles on web site promotion. Whether you read only this article or many articles, our statistics will show you as only one visitor.
- Hit or Page View: Each time a page is viewed on your web site it is a counted as a hit or a page view. E.g. Every time you click on one of our links our hits will increase by one.
The above information is very useful and needs to be tracked on a regular basis to
- Analyze if your promotion efforts are paying off or not. This can be done by assessing whether your hits and visitors are increasing, decreasing or remaining stagnant.
- Check if your page views are proportionately much higher than your visitors.
- If it is higher, it means that your visitors are interested in what your site has to offer and are moving around the site.
- If it is almost the same or just double then it means visitors are only viewing one or two pages and then clicking out of your site.
Tip: Make sure you have a good navigation system so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for.
Other Important Terms
- Referrer Domain: This is the URL through which your visitors come to your website. It could be a search engine, directory or just another site that links to your website. Using referrer information you can
- Find out where your visitors are coming
- Find out where you are getting the most traffic from
- Find out if your website is indexed and ranked high on a particular search engine.
- When you see visitors coming to your site through a particular search engine, you can confirm that your website is indexed and ranked pretty high on the particular search engine.
- On the other hand, if you find that even after 2-3 months you are not getting visitors from certain search engines, it probably means that you are either not indexed in their database or are not ranked high enough.
- Stats by monitored page: This helps to tell you
- The hits for each of your website pages.
- The most popular pages as well as the pages that are not being visited in your website
Based on these statistics you can
- Use your popular pages to draw visitors within the site.
- Give visitors a special offer or put cool links to get them to visit the rest of your site.
- Resubmit or work on the pages that are not getting enough hits
- Other useful statistics includes hourly stats, browsers and platforms, stats by location and weekly and monthly stats.
Below is a demo of our site statistics from GoldStats. Note that the most prominent information is the hits and the visitors, which is shown in red. The other information provided is the referring domain, stats by location, hourly stats and browsers and platforms.
And finally a friendly piece of advice - Be patient :)
Don't expect visitors to come flocking to your site right after you submit your site to the search engines and directories. Search Engines will take approx. 2-3 weeks to index your site and since directories are reviewed by people they will take much longer, sometimes upto 6 months. Be patient and use this time to develop quality content in your site that you can promote by getting other sites to link to you. However, don't forget to check your site statistics everyday. |
