Web Site Statistics
Analyzing your site traffic to know your visitors
Using a web site statistics tool is an absolute
must for all those of you you are serious about site promotion
and Internet marketing. You need a reliable traffic analysis
tool to know what are your total hits, how many visitors are
coming to your site, where they are coming from, and other
important visitor information.
Lets see how web site statistics can help us. We
have explained some important terms that you will come across
while analyzing your statistics and how you can use them to
understand your traffic.
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Visitor/Unique:
A visitor is a unique person that visits your site. He/She may
travel through many pages in your site but 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 one visitor.
-
Hit or Page View:
The number of times your web site has been hit i.e.
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.
This information is very useful and needs to be tracked on a
regular basis to see if your hits and visitors are increasing,
decreasing or remaining stagnant. At one glance you will be
able see if your promotion efforts are paying off or not (If
your visitors and hits are continuously increasing it is
fantastic).
You should also check if your page views are proportionately
much higher than your visitors. If it is, its good news! This
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 Terms
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Referrer Domain:
This is the URL through which your visitors come to your site.
It could be a search engine, directory or just another site
that has linked to you. Using referrer information you can
find out where your visitors are coming from and where you are
getting the most traffic from. It is also a useful way to find
out if you are indexed and ranked high on a particular search
engine. As soon as you see visitors coming to your site
through a particular search engine you know that you are
indexed and ranked pretty high. If you find that even after
2-3 months you aren't getting visitors from certain search
engines, it probably means you are either not indexed in their
database or are not ranked high.
-
Stats by monitored
page:
This tells you the hits for each of your pages. Through
these stats you will be able to tell which are your most
popular pages and which pages are not being visit. Use your
popular pages to draw visitors within the site. Give them 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 hits.
These are some of the important things that you
must look at. Other useful information includes hourly stats,
browsers and platforms, stats by location and weekly and monthly
stats.
Sample Statistics
A demo of our site statistics from GoldStats is
shown above. As you can see the most prominent information is
the hits and the visitors, shown in red. The other information
provided is the referring domain, stats by location, hourly
stats and browsers and platforms.
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. But don't forget
to check your site statistics everyday.
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