MaineBusiness.com

Traffic Reports Lead to Better Web Sites

Do you have access to your Web site traffic reports? Do you read them?

Recently we've picked up a couple of clients who currently have Web sites but either don't have traffic reports or don't know how to access them. One of the first things I recommend is that we set up traffic reports for them immediately. This helps benchmark the success (or lack thereof) of the new site.

By continually reviewing the traffic reports we can make changes, add new content or articles, create more links to important but under visited sections of the site and more.

Traffic reports are required reading for anyone who cares about the success of their Web site.

Good traffic reports tell you:

• how many people visited your site
• where they came from (another Web site, a search engine, a bookmark, etc.)
• what search engine they used
• what search terms they used
• how long they spent at your site
• how many pages they viewed at your site
• the first and last pages they visited at your site
• and more.

While most decent Web site hosting companies include traffic reports, lately I've been enjoying the stats generated by Google Analytics (formerly Urchin.) The reports are free, and it's a hosted solution (meaning you don't have to do anything on your own server.) Also, if you do use Google Adwords for your pay-per-click advertising, you can more deeply track all of your ads' ROI.

You'll need a Google account (free) to get going, and ability to add some code into your Web pages, or hire a professional to do it for you. The whole process should take 2 - 3 hours depending on the size of your site and your comfort level.

The reports you receive are incredibly revealing. The home page will greet you with a 20,000' foot view of how your site is doing.

There are dozens of different reports you can run, as well as target specific dates or ranges of dates to see how a newspaper or TV ad may have impacted your traffic.

One report I always review is the referrers report; this tells me where my traffic is coming from.

One report that I just discovered is very interesting. It shows a working version of any page in your Web site, along with graphs next to each link to show what percentage of traffic clicked on each link.

The tan bars appear under each link and the blue bar shows visually the percentage. By clicking on each bar you can get more details. From this page you can see that during the past week 12.42% of my home page visitors clicked on the link to download 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Web Site.

If I was trying to drive more traffic to a specific part of the site, this would help me determine if I needed to promote it more heavily on a given page.

The only shortcoming of this is that Google Analytics can't tell which link the visitor clicked on, just how many people clicked a link that went to a given page. In other words, was it the image that caught their attention or the text link?

Still, if you're looking for help on how to drive more qualified traffic to your site and how to get your site visitors to take the appropriate steps to close the sale, reviewing your traffic reports is an essential first step.

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