Most web hosts today offer web traffic reports as part of your hosting package. Contact your host today if you don’t know where to find these reports. Web traffic reports are a critical part of every marketing campaign – both online and offline. In addition to telling you how many people visited your site, traffic reports can tell you how visitors found your site and how they are using it when they get there.
How many site visitors do you get in a month?
It is important to look at the number of visitors instead of the number of hits. The number of hits represents all files loaded by your website and includes pages, images and other files. The number of visitors will tell you how many people viewed your site. Most traffic reports will break this down further to tell you how many of these visitors were repeating visitors.
Monthly Web Traffic
You should also be able to see a graph of traffic over time. Most peaks in traffic will be credited to a marketing/advertising campaign you executed – whether it was an electronic newsletter that went out, a tradeshow/event you attended, a direct mail campaign that was sent out, an advertisement you ran in a magazine, etc.
Website Statistics
How are visitors finding your site?
Good web traffic reports will show you how visitors are finding your site. This information can be found in the “Referrers”, “Search Engines”, “Search Terms/Phrases” section of your report.
Referrers are other sites that link to your site. For example, Q2 Interactive Marketing and Design is a member of NAWBO Orange County and we have a listing in their member directory. When someone clicks on the link in our NAWBO listing to arrive at the Q2 website, it shows up as a referrer on our web traffic reports. This is a great tool for tracking the effectiveness of your directory listings.
There should also be a section in your traffic reports that tells you which search engines are sending you traffic. You can see if your traffic is mostly coming from Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL or any of the other search engines. In addition to the name of the search engine, you can see the actual search terms and phrases visitors are typing in to find your site.
How are visitors using your site when they get there?
The reports will show you which pages get the most views. Some reports will go further to show you exit pages (the last page someone viewed on your site) and paths visitors took through your site.
If your website is not generating business it is important to determine if you aren’t getting much traffic or if your website is just not converting visitors to customers. If you are getting a lot of traffic, but not a lot of customers from that traffic, it may indicate that visitors can’t find the information they are looking for or your call to action is not clear.
Dawn Chiu (DQ)
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