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.

• 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

• 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.