Analysing your website traffic

As a webmaster or SEO it is important to regularly analyse your website traffic. By analysing it you inspect the log files or statistics and decide which areas of the website are performing well, and not performing well, and also identify any new areas of content that can be capitalised on.

Getting the data

Traditionally web site traffic data was obtained from the web server log files, which had to be processed. Today online analysis services, such as Google Analytics, make the task much easier and more powerful.

Online analysis services

Today the easiest and best way to analyse the traffic data of a website is to use the free tools provided by various companies. Google Analytics and StatCounter are the two I would recommend. By adding a simple piece of provided code to your web pages your website traffic data is reported to the data centre. You can then login and run reports at the data centre, easily seeing traffic and visitor data of your website. These tools are free, quick and extremely valuable. The only downside is that the data collected by these tools is owned by the respective companies, and they are likely to see it to other companies, including your competitors. Consider carefully before using one of these services.

Web site log files

Almost all web sites generate web server log files. Each time a web site web page or file is viewed an entry is written to the log file. Using an application it is possible to process the log files, and generate reports of visitor data. Previously this was the only option, although it is much easier to use on of the online analysis tools, such as Good Analytics. However companies such as Google are likely to see the data about your website, so processing your web site log files is a good option is you want to keep everything confidential.

What to look for in the data

Whether you use an online analysis service, such as Google Analytics, or process your own log files, you will have a large array of data to look at.. You should regularly carry out a number of tasks based on this data. I suggest checking the data once per month; check a months data when the next month has just started. This will give you time to make adjustments to the website, and then have almost a complete months of data to check the effectiveness of your changes.

Regular tasks

Check popular pages

Check which pages are being viewed the most. The pages that have most visitors should be used to offer your services or adverts; maximise the most visited pages. You should also make it easy for visitors to find other content from those popular pages. Which pages are underperformed? Analyse those pages, and make changes to increase visitor numbers.

Check referring source

Referring sources are the web sites that your visitors are coming from. Your visitors are following links on these websites and landing on your web pages. The referring sources will include search engines, web directories and any web pages that have links to your web site, that people have followed. Any visitors to your website that do not have a referring source are called 'direct visits'. Direct visits occur when people follow their own bookmarks or when they type your URL directly into their browser.

Check search engine data

Search engine data will include which search engines people are using to find your website, and which search terms they are using. If people are not finding your website using your primary keyword terms then you need to optimize for these terms more.

Check errors

Check the errors report as this will list any errors that are occurring on your pages. These errors can be internal server errors or script errors. Check and resolve them all. More importantly though are broken links. If you have renamed or removed pages from your website people may be following links to these old pages. If they are they will appear in the report. Resolve these errors to maximise your traffic.

Check entry and exit pages

Check the entry page report and understand which pages people entry the site on. Do these entry pages describe your website to visitors? Do not rely on the homepage alone to do this. Ensure visitors can find your primary content and services from the main entry pages. Check the exit page report. Why are people leaving your site on these pages? Optimise these pages to try and retain your visitors.