Let me begin by saying, the number of hits you get, does not impress me.
Your web traffic is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages visited. Web masters and SEO officers monitor incoming and outgoing traffic, to determine which portions of the website are most popular; and if there are any visible trends. Data collected can reveal a specific page or product that is viewed most often by people in a particular geographical area; allowing you to adjust your search engine marketing campaign, target motivated consumers and encourage conversions.
Below are some important terms you should be aware of when reviewing and translating website statistics:
- A Hit is generated when any file is served. The page itself is considered a file, but images are also files. Thus, a page with 5 images would generate 6 hits. This is not a true indicator of your popularity.
- A Page View is generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site – a visitor will always generate at least one page view (the main page) but should be encouraged to generate many more.
- The number of visitors- compare the number of unique visitors to the total.
- The average number of page views per visitor – a high number would indicate that the average visitors go deep inside the site; possibly because they enjoy it or find it useful. It could also indicate an inability to find desired information easily.
- Average visit duration – the total length of a user’s visit.
- Average page duration – how long a page is viewed for on average.
- Domain classes – all levels of the IP Addressing information required to deliver.
- Busy times – the most popular viewing time of the site would show when would be the best time to do promotional campaigns and when would be the most ideal to perform maintenance.
- Most requested pages – the most popular pages.
- Most requested entry pages – the entry page is the first page viewed by a visitor and shows which are the pages most attracting visitors.
- Most requested exit pages – the most requested exit pages could help find bad pages, broken links or the exit pages may have a popular external link; encoraging visitors to leave your website.
- Top paths – a path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit, with the top paths identifying the way most customers go through the site.
- Referrals- The host can track the (apparent) source of the links and determine which sites are generating the most traffic for a particular page.
Although there are many highly effective methods of monitoring, website traffic is most often analyzed by viewing traffic statistics; found in the web server Log File. This is an automatically generated list of all pages served. Properly translated, the results can be employed to structure websites, highlight security concerns and indicate flaws in other areas; such as, a potential lack of bandwidth.
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