Site Traffic Analysis

Monthly analysis of the visitors to your site is essential if you want a competitive site — because if you’re not tracking and analyzing the traffic on your small-business website, you have no way of knowing if you’ve made good content and marketing decisions.

Think of competing on the Internet as a game where you're going up against a strong opponent. Site traffic analysis — sometimes called Web analytics — gives you the facts you need to develop competitive strategies.

Watch the traffic on your site so that you know if you’re steadily getting more traffic as time goes by, if you’re stalled on a plateau, or if you’re slipping behind. If you don't know the score, how can you compete?

Choose a Site Traffic Analysis Service

If you are the Internet marketing coordinator for your own small-business website, you should personally watch and analyze your site's traffic statistics.

You might consider paying for a third-party service as an alternative to what is offered at no charge by the search engines or your Web hosting company. Some of these services can be confusing because are designed for experienced professionals who do this full time.

But there are also site traffic analysis services suitable for small businesses that need to monitor their own site traffic. Allied Internet discusses some of the options with its clients.

Website Visitor Analysis

You'll be looking for answers to questions like these:

• How many first-time visitors are visiting your site each month? Is your overall traffic increasing month-by-month? Is the number of page views increasing month-by-month?
• Who’s visiting your site? Are you getting the geographic distribution you’re looking for?
• How did they get to your site? By clicking on a link in email or on a website or blog? By finding you with one of the search engines or in a directory?
• Which parts of your site did they visit?
• How long did they stay on your site?
• Conversion tracking — how many of your visitors are actually turning into customers?

Site Abandonment Rate Analysis

Abandonment rates for each of your landing pages may be your most important statistics.

• What percentage of visitors to your site leave immediately after they’ve looked at your homepage? Can you explain and/or remedy this?
• What are the principal exit pages on your site? The home page, the About Us page, the Contact page, one of your category pages?
• Which are the principal entry pages and exit pages on your site?
• Do most visitors enter your site on your homepage, or on one of your category pages?
• Does traffic analysis show any interesting navigation patterns on your site?
• Where on your site do most people go when they click to leave your home page?
• Which are the most and least visited pages on your site?
• Any surprises?

Functionality Use Analysis

• How often is the functionality on your site — forms and databases, for example — is being used?
• If you have a shopping cart, how many purchases are made each week and each month? Does a review of your shopping cart process tell you anything?
• How many visitors are filling out your forms?
• How many are signing up for your mailing list?

Using Traffic Analysis to Set Benchmarks for Your Site

• Are you getting more and more referrals from the search engines each month?
• Which search terms and which search engines are driving traffic to your site?
• Where is your site on the search engine results pages for each of your principal targeted search terms? Are you in the top five on the first page?
• Evaluate your performance on each of the major search engines.
• Are more and more websites referring visitors to your site each month?