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Web Marketing and Website Traffic Analysis |
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eMarketing Articles -
e-Marketing: Strategy
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Written by Mark Nenadic
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 Among the best ways to get the very most out of your web
marketing is to analyze the traffic that you already have on you
website. You need to develop an understanding of who is visiting
your website, what they want from your website, and what they’re doing
once they’re there. Unless you have this information, it is
challenging to improve it in a way that will better meet the
expectations of your visitors.
In order to analyze your website traffic, you can choose one or many of the following four techniques:
» A webpage counter
» A statistical package from your ISP
» Web traffic analysis software
» Hire a professional to audit your website traffic
Counters are one of the oldest tools that have been added to
websites. They can be visible to your website visitors, or
invisible to them so that only you can see. A web counter is a
very basic addition to your website that simply registers the number of
people who visit any given page on your site. Of course, showing
this isn’t exactly the most professional way to run a website.
Sure, they’re alright for personal pages, but for a business that is
trying to develop a good reputation and make a good impression, this
probably isn’t really the way to go.
With the statistical package from your ISP (Internet Service Provider),
you’ll be able to have a look at a log of every visit your website has
received. This will be available to you in the form of either a
webpage or a graphic for your analysis. The information is often
registered in raw NCSA combined log file format, which is rather
challenging to use for the average user. It is full of
complicated coding that must be deciphered for each individual “hit”
that your webpage has received. If you know what you’re doing,
however, this method does indeed provide you with a good amount of
information, such as the way that people are getting to your website
(for example, by way of a search engine or a link from another site)
and what they are doing at your site once they have arrived.
If you are using a good quality ISP, then you will likely have a
freeware version of a popular statistical analysis package available to
you. There are many good ones from which you can choose, and
you’ll find the results very useful. You can have your ISP
produce a daily, weekly, monthly (etc) report for you to use.
They can either be posted on a webpage for you, or emailed directly
into your inbox. You’ll need to contact your ISP to find out
exactly what services they offer in this regard.
If that doesn’t work for you, if you want a better detailed report, or
if your ISP simply doesn’t provide that service, then you may wish to
purchase a web traffic analysis software program. There are tons
of these programs available at affordable prices that will provide you
with a broad range of analysis options for the traffic you receive on
your website. To use these programs, you simply need to download
access logs from your ISP using an FTP program.
You’ll need to ask your ISP about the directory in which those logs can
be found. The software will then parse (interpret) the raw log
file information one line at a time to provide you with results in
various combinations and formats for your use. Though the more
high-end programs can cost over $5 thousand, there are many software
packages that are available to us “normal folk” with varying degrees of
options and abilities, but at much more affordable prices. You
can easily obtain a good quality software package at around $300.
So why do you need these stats so badly for your web marketing?
The fact of the matter is that they give you a goal for your
marketing. They show you:
» Which web pages on your site are most popular
» Which pages on your site are least popular
» Who is visiting your website
» Which browsers they are using to view your website
» Which search engines are sending the most visitors
» Which banner ads are sending you the most visitors
» Where the errors and bad links may exist on your website.
Mark Nenadic
Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North http://www.15dn.com , where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design. |
