Have You Seen Your Web Traffic Report?
If you own a web site, you may have seen web traffic reports for your site. Every website host provides some form of traffic analysis tools and reporting features as a part of their web hosting package. Based on my experience, many site owners are neither aware of their potential nor do they make use of those (sometimes) powerful tools that come free with your paid subscription.
Here are some key information you can get out of traffic reports:
- Most popular pages of your web site
- Browsers used by the visitors
- Referring sites generating traffic to your web site (like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo)
- Entry pages showing the first page visited
- Paths taken by the visitors
- Search phrases used by visitors to find your site
- Errors experienced by the visitors
The above can provide rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. This can also be very handy during your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts.
Another option to study web traffic is Google Analytics. Once you sign up and setup a profile for your web site, you will be given a Javascript code for placement on your web pages you want Google to report.
Once you know more about your site and the visitor behavior, you can sign up for Google Adsense program. This will let you pick ads to place on your site for which Google will pay you on a monthly basis if the income exceeds $100.
Now that you know some of the benefits, make sure to ask for web traffic reports from your host or your web master and have it delivered to you weekly via email. Spend few minutes to look at the key sections and make adjustments to your site; after few iterations you should see the benefits.
How about making it one of your new year resolutions? Feel free to drop a line or two to share your experience with us.
Charlie
Posted at 16:05h, 18 DecemberThanks for sharing, I use Google Analytics on my websites but I also use Clicky analytics because they do one thing that Google Analytics doesn’t do and that is they give you real time analytics so that you can see who is online right now and what pages they clicked on. I use both because I like both interfaces.
On Google Adsense I wouldn’t dare use it on our main real estate site but I do use it on a local community site. I don’t want to distract visitors to my main RE site and risk sending them away for pennies. But if the site has some traffic adsense can help pay the bills. Thanks for sharing
Murali Vasudevan
Posted at 02:38h, 19 DecemberCharlie,
Thanks for the info. Took a look at Clicky and I can see how it is different from Google. I will try the FREE version. I see your point on Google Adsense. Makes sense.
Charlie
Posted at 16:05h, 18 DecemberThanks for sharing, I use Google Analytics on my websites but I also use Clicky analytics because they do one thing that Google Analytics doesn’t do and that is they give you real time analytics so that you can see who is online right now and what pages they clicked on. I use both because I like both interfaces.
On Google Adsense I wouldn’t dare use it on our main real estate site but I do use it on a local community site. I don’t want to distract visitors to my main RE site and risk sending them away for pennies. But if the site has some traffic adsense can help pay the bills. Thanks for sharing
CarmenBrodeur
Posted at 00:18h, 22 DecemberI use google analytics and strongly recommend it. It is vital to know where your traffic is coming from and what pages are stickiest.