Learn How to Understand Traffic & Reap the Benefits!

From the very first day your web site goes online it will start to receive traffic, if even only a tiny amount. Understanding the traffic you’re getting will greatly increase your ability to market your web site effectively and to turn visitors into sales. In this article you’ll learn what traffic to look for and how to benefit from it.

To understand the terms used in the document you can access our glossary for more information.

There are three important aspects to gaining results from your traffic statistics:

1. Referrers– Understanding where your visitors come from and how many.
2. Visitor Metrics (Metrics: Methods that a company has come up with to measure something.) – Knowing how many users visit what pages and analysing the results.
3. Site Optimisation– Change your site by knowing how many visitors you receive where to benefit from that knowledge.

Referrers

The whole point about knowing the referrer data is to know where your visitors come from. When analysing your referrer data you can see what link a visitor has used to reach your web site. Some of the important information you can receive from your referrer data includes:

• Search Engine Searches– Most of the time you can see what term a visitor used on a search engine before clicking through. Very valuable information in understanding what terms are being used to find your web site.
• Search Engine Robots– You can see what robots are visiting your site and how often. Depending on the individual robots that have visited your site you can tell what search engines have crawled your site.
• Advertising Click Throughs– You can see the statistics on your advertisements and measure how many visitors you get against how much you spend.

The last point is potentially the most important and you may need to have system in your web site of “referring URLs”. This means that you have the ability to generate a unique URL for a particular advertisement from which you track your exact click throughs and performance of those click throughs. Analysing such statistics as how many sales are made from a particular ad, or unique URL, will allow you to measure the performance of your ad against your spend.

Visitor Metrics

Understanding your visitors is extremely important to help you shape the content and structure of your web site in order to maximise the results from visitors. There are two vital pieces of data needed for your visitor metrics:

• Page Impressions
• Unique Visitors

By using each of these individual pieces of data you can provide your self with invaluable information, including:

• Page Impressions to Unique Visitors– By analysing the page impressions against unique visitors you can determine an average of how many people visit how many pages on your web site. This with the data on what pages they visit can assist greatly by knowing what are the most popular pages, why they might be more popular and how you can improve your site to encourage people to visit other pages.
• Unique Visitors to Outcome– This is potentially the most important information to analyse the effectiveness of your web site. Analysing how many unique visitors it takes to achieve your outcome, whether it’s a sale or a sign up to a service. This data can shape your marketing efforts by knowing, for example, that it might take 25 visitors to achieve one sale. You know then that if you want to make 4 sales you need 100 visitors.

These two pieces of information can overlap too. For instance if you know it takes 4 unique visitors to make one sale, then you can also analyse a particular page that they make a sale from.

Site Optimisation.You can put the information from the two proceeding points together to better understand how to develop your site in a way that will effectively achieve your outcome. Some examples may include…

1. You might find that you get a lot of unique visitors from a particular referrer, they visit a lot of pages but they don’t make a purchase. From this you can analyse what you need to do to your web site to cater for those visitors and prompt them to make a purchase.
2. You may find a referrer who sends you a small amount of visitors to a specific page, but one in two of them make a purchase. You’ll then know that the page(s) they land at are well optimised for them. This might help you change other pages to suit others better.

The two examples above are just two of potentially hundreds of combinations. The important thing is that you understand how you might arrive at a certain conclusion and how to adjust your site accordingly.

Where do you get your traffic statistics?

Ultimately you will receive most of your data from server logs, and here are a myriad of different programs that can be used to product reports from that data. You will, more than likely, need to talk to your web developer as to what reporting program you use, and how to alter your web site design to maximise the benefits of your visitors.

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