Analyzing traffic to your website requires that you install the right product for the job. It’s not shilling for a product to say that Google Analytics is the standard package used for this purpose. There are other packages out there, but Google’s product is the standard at the moment and most of the large sites out there are using it. The package allows you to view some important information about your visitors. One advantage of this software is that, for most users, it actually provides more information than is needed, which is much better than providing too little!
Google_Analytics
The Stats:
Google Analytics provides statistics for your traffic that quantifies it in several different ways. For example, you’ll get the raw data having to do with how many people came to visit your site and you’ll also get data regarding what pages get the most views. You’ll be able to see how long visitors stayed on each of the pages and what pages they used most often to exit your site. There is plenty of data to analyze.
The Overview section is the part of the analytic package that you’ll want to check daily if you’re serious about search engine optimization. This part of the package allows you to get a broad look at where your traffic’s coming from and what pages visitors are looking at. It also allows you to see a graph of your daily activity and a map of the nations from which your traffic is originating.
You can drill down on these statistics to get more detailed views of the activity on any given day.
The Analysis:
Some of the statistics that you’ll really want to pay attention to include:
Pageviews: This is found on the right hand side of the overview page. It gives you the raw number of people who visited on the day that you’re looking, on the day before, over the course of the last month and over the lifetime of the website. This lets you know which direction your traffic stats are going in.
Traffic Sources: This lets you know whether or not your SEO, SEM and backward linking strategies are working. If you see sites that you don’t recognize, go check them out to see what the cross appeal with your site might be.
Pages/Posts: This tells you what pages and posts are getting the most traffic. Good web administrators will take what works on the popular pages and change the unpopular pages so that they offer something similar. This is the best way to make sure that your site is doing everything possible to draw people to all of the pages available, not just the most well-known ones.
Installing Google Analytics is easy. There are other packages that you can install, as well, and they’ll likely give you pretty similar information to Google’s product. At the moment, however, Google Analytics is pretty much the gold standard of web traffic tracking, so you’ll want to give it some serious consideration if you’re adding such a product to your pages.
