Web
Site Traffic
How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (part 1)
Getting traffic to your web site without
analyzing it, is like being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but
you don’t know which direction they are coming from or who they
are. Without analyzing your web site traffic, it’s difficult to
improve your web site marketing.
Know Your Traffic Language You should
be aware of the different terms used to describe web site traffic, so
as not to be confused about your web site visitors. Here are the main
terms used:
Visit – these are all requests
made by a specific user to the site during a set period of time. The visit
is ended if a set period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further
accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or hostnames/ip addresses.
Hit – this is a request to the
server for a file not a page. Your page can be made up of different files,
such as graphic files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting
in a number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a
hit.
Counting hits is not the same as tracking
pageviews. It takes multiple hits to view a page.
Pageview/Impression – this is
the number of times a page is accessed as a whole.
Unique View - A page view by a unique
person within a 24 hour period.
Referrer - A page that links to your
site. By looking at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your
site. This can be particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine
traffic is coming from.
User Agent - This refers to the software
used to access your site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or
"client", the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser
like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you
can identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll be
able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search engines last
crawled your pages.
In Part
2 of this article series we'll look at some of the ways to track your
web site visitors. click here
About the author:
Herman Drost is a Certified Web Site Designer (CIW), owner and author
of iSiteBuild.com Affordable Hosting, Site Design and Promotion Packages
http://www.isitebuild.com
Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips”
newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com.
Read more of his in-depth articles at:
www.isitebuild.com/articles
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