Web Traffic Analytics - Part 2

In today’s Tools of the Trade Tuesday, I’m finishing the 2-part series on analyzing website traffic data. What’s more, it’s normally available to you on your hosting service if you host your own WordPress site or blog. Analyzing website traffic data is an important SEO task for any online marketer. By using various web analytical tools mentioned in PART 1 – you will discover how many returning and unique visitors visited your website daily, and what they do when arriving there.

Analyzing a sales page

If your website has a sales page where you are selling or promoting a product, you’ll learn how many bought the product or clicked on a link, and how many left without bothering with it. If a large number of visitors are landing on your sales page, but the amount of sales are low in comparison, you’ll then understand that something about your sales page is not converting the visits into sales. It could well mean that the sales page is either poorly written for conversion, or there are too many elements on the page that distracted the visitors, or the links are not working, or a number of other causes for the poor sale results. It is then up to you to change or recreate the sales page – then test the page’s performance all over again using these tools to see if those changes improve your results.

Other pages and posts

There are a number of reasons to do website traffic analysis using cPanel’s various analytical tools. As I mentioned earlier, Web Statistics are vital for the success of your website and you marketing campaign results. With an intelligent and persistent use of these analytical tools, you can discover all the weaknesses of your website and its various pages to make changes for improvement.

Using commercial web analytic packages

There are also a number of commercial web analyzing packages you can use to find out more about your website’s vital traffic statistics, and also other important statistics in relation to the site’s other information. These packages use a number of tools to analyze the statistics. Log analysis packages are expensive and they are also complex and time consuming to set up.

Free web analytics

Apart from these commercial packages, you can also use a number of other free web analysis packages that are available online including Google Analytics. Most recently, I’ve been trying out a free WordPress plugin on this site called – WP Slimstat found here. Even though it has only been activated on my site for a few days, I’m already impressed by the amount of information it as logged!

What to look for when considering web analytics

Ideally, you want a analytical tool that can give you website statistical information about:

• How many visitors came to your website – daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
• Where they originated from like for Geo-targeting.
• How the visitors located your website.
• What search engines, links from other websites, and other web resources like ads were helpful in sending traffic to your site.
• What search terms like key-phrases and keyword did people used to find your site.
• Which pages and posts on your site are being frequently visited vs. others.
• What behaviors your visitors display once they arrive on your web page – Do they go to a particular web page on your site, or there is any random pattern of their movement, or do they completely leave your site once they arrive?

These questions are very important in determining the effectiveness of your site. When analyzing tools can give you correct answers to all of these questions, then you can determine what actions are needed to make your website commercial successful.

Page views per visitor

These tools provide great help to you for understanding the traffic patterns on your website. By using cPanel’s greatest tool is the statistics provided by the Page Views/Visitors. An easy way to know when to change the content on any page or a website is when you are not getting enough visitors – when page views are showing less than 2 pages viewed per visitor, or time of each visit on your site is extremely low. These stats show that the site is not keeping or attracting the visitors attention and, therefore, needs redesigning with either better content or sales copy, hard to navigate, or doesn’t link to related content that would make the visitor stay longer or purchase your products. When your content is effective – then it will reflect both with the number of visitors to your site and the amount of time they stay there. Sales can also improve tremendously. By using website statistics in the best way possible, you can greatly improve the overall performance of your site.

Final thoughts…

By analyzing website traffic data with the help of reliable analytical tools, can help you fine tune your website for optimal performance. Your website statistics are always available on your site to help you succeed. It’s up to you to learn how to use them, to interpret the different forms of data available, to analyze it intelligently, and then take action to fine tune the performance of your site or blog. What about you? Do you use web analytics for your site? What tool works best for you? Please leave a comment and share with your favorite social network, thanks! :)