Understanding & Analysing Web Traffic

For any online business to succeed and grow over a period of time, it is vital to carefully understand and analyse the traffic trends and carry out the advertising campaigns accordingly. For e.g. lets say a website is selling something in Australia only, but getting 80% of its visitors from US and other countries, then those visitors are more or less useless to it. With traffic, its not only quantity which matters, but its also the quality of the traffic.

There are three main ways of tracking down your web traffic, namely

1. Log-Analysis Programs
2. Page-Embedding
3. Do-It Yourself

Log-Analysis programs create traffic reports, graphs, charts, etc. by analysing a website’s server logs. Some of them are available free, whereas others have to be purchased.

Page Embedding refers to placing a piece of JavaScript code within the page you want tracked. This helps in real-time tracking. Requests from spiders and bots are eliminated and hence they cannot be tracked. This is usually done using third parties. The code is provided by third parties, and then placed in your pages. To access the statistical information, you have to login to their servers, where you can see your graphs, etc.

Finally you can dump your log files, into your own database - MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. and then you can use queries to extract the required information

You can usually download your log files, through your control panel, or access them, through a FTP client (stored in a folder called Logs). These contain valuable information, which can be accessed through any of the three methods mentioned above:

Visits : This refers to the number of requests, made by a user during a set period of time.

Hits : This refers to the number of requests for files on the server. So for e.g. is there are 3 pictures, an audio file, etc. on a page, that means, when there is a visit to that page, that will give multiple hits.

Unique Visits : This refers to visits by a unique person, usually identified by IP address during a 24-hour period. This is one the most important statistical information needed to assess the growth of a website.

Impressions : This refers to the number of times a particular page is requested. Hence it is also known as page views.

Referrers : This referrers to who is sending the traffic to your website. It could be other websites, or search engines. Once again, this is one of the most important parts of any web statistics and has a major influence on your marketing activities. You would want to maintain healthy relations with sources that send you heavy traffic.

User Agent : This usually refers to the browser being used by the visitor, although it also contains other things like php scripts, and bots giving you hits.

There is certain information that your web statistics cannot give you, which includes, individual identities of people accessing your web sites, how long they stayed at the site, and how long they spent on each page. Another problem with statistics can be that sometimes people with the same IP address can be counted as a single unique.

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