Basic Rules for Any WEB site

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Web Page Traffic

The Language

It is quite common to confuse the proper terminology used when discussing web page traffic. Here is a quick primer:

Hit

A hit for any file on your site be it a page, a graphic, or a script. Thus, asking someone "how many hits do you get" is a meaningless statement (unless you really want to know the total number of actual hits in case you are interested in bandwidth or the like). Better to ask "how many page views" or "how many user sessions".
Page View
The number times any actual visible pages have been accessed on your site.
User Sessions
The actual number of people who have visited your site.
Referrer
The way someone got to your site. Was it from your link on Yahoo, or the banner ad campaign you have going, or what?

To give you an example, Sue clicks on a link from Yahoo to visit our site at http://www.killertactics.com. Yahoo is the referrer and this will show up in our logs. Then, she visits the first page. On that first page there are 8 graphic images. So, Sue has generated one "user session", nine "hits" (one for the page and eight for the graphics), and one page view. As she browses the rest of the site, of course those numbers change.

The Requirements

Your hosting service should keep server logs for you and provide you with full access. If they don't, you should ask them to turn the option on now. Now, if they simply won't give you access to the log files and you don't feel like transferring, FreeStats will track for you without looking at your logs, but the information is very limited and the results are not as reliable.

Also make sure that they turn on your "referrer logs" if they have not done so already. That will tell you where your traffic is coming from. Obviously something that is good to know! Foreverweb.Net is a hosting sulution that provides all of this if you want a good place to start.

The Data

Personally, I would require that any analysis tool I use provided all of the following at a minimum:

Total Page Views - The total number of pages seen on your site.

Total Home Page Views - The number of times your home page was accessed.

Views for Each Page - The total number of times each of your pages have been viewed.

Most Requested Pages - Which pages have been seen the most?

Server Errors - Find out if people are requesting files that don't exist on your server. Fix these errors immediately. Otherwise you're just throwing away traffic!

Top Paths through Site - Find out the order in which people are viewing your page. Use this information to modify your approach. If people are leaving at one certain page, make a change to entice them to a sales pitch for your products.

Browsers Used - Find out which browsers people are using to visit your site. For example, if most of your viewers seem to be using an old browser, you obviously don't want to make your site dependent on Java.

Referring Sites - Find out where your traffic is coming from. Use this info to determine which of your marketing efforts are working and adjust your campaigns accordingly.

This is just barely scratching the surface, but it's enough to get you started. As you look more deeply at your logs you will get many great insights about your website and what you can do to improve your results.

I personally analyze the log files of every one of our sites (and we own quite a few) on a daily basis.

Your logs are the very soul of market testing on the Internet. If you aren't paying close attention to this info, take a few hours to implement a solution now. I promise it will have a tremendous impact on your marketing efforts.

Article by Mark Joyner, 

Basic Rules
for
Any WEB site

• How to Start
  

• The 12 Rules
  

• Advertise More Effectively
  

• Web Page Traffic
  

• E-Commerce