Keeping Track Of You Website's Visitor Statistics

By: Patrick Sia

It is important to understand your traffic statistics. The most important of your traffic statistics is likely on how many orders or inquires you could get at the end of the day. In order to understand your site performance, it is critical that you should know some of the facts here.
First of all, you should forget about the hit rate. It does not necessary means that when a visitor visit your page, the number will naturally increase by one. When a visitor visits a web page, he/she might be requesting several files all at once: the file for the page, as well as the files for all the graphics on the page. By visiting one page on a site the visitor could have registered several hits. As such, Hits rate may not always give you a good picture of what is happening on your site.
A more precise and useful indicator of your traffic is the amount of unique visitors you get for each day. You must know that internet statistics will never precise. However, the number of unique visitors may give you s rough idea of how many visitors are visiting your website in each day. You could then work out the conversion rate and by comparing this number to the amount of orders or inquiries you received.
Another critical Internet statistic to watch for is the referrers. So what is referrer?
A referrer basically is the website where a person was visiting prior to landing on your site. Examples of such referrers are the search engines and those sites that link to you. This will help you to understand how many people just typed in your url and how many of them came after seeing your link in another location.
It is rather important to understand where your visitors come from, and even better, what are they searching for. Note that most trackers or log analysis program will give you the search terms that were used on the referring search engines.
You should take a look at these terms and see whether you are really getting targeted traffic. You have to adjust the content of your website accordingly if what you consider to be your most important keywords are not high up in the list of search terms that people are actually using to find you.
You should also need to know which pages do they use to enter your site, and from which pages do they leave the site? Which are the pages that are most frequently visited and which pages are least frequently visited? Finally, what is the pattern of the traffic on your site?
You can get access to these statistics in a few ways. They are:
1. Your hosting provider could already have a built in traffic analysis program, such as Awstats and Webalizer. Both programs are excellent. Just log into your account and view your statistics online.
2. You can analyze your site's access logs using programs installed on your computer. OpenWebScope program is one of them, it is available at www.openwebscope.com. You could easily obtain a trial version and start to analyze your site's access log. You will end up with a report of visitor activity on your website.
3. The other way is to paste java script tracking code to your pages. Several companies provide java script trackers. Once your tracker is installed, all you have to do is to log onto a site to see your stats. You could get free trackers tools one of them is at http://extreme-dm.com/tracking.

You should start to the above method that is easy for you to start tracking your traffic statistic. This information could be useful to improve the performance of your website. Only when you get an idea of who your visitors are, how they are finding your website and which pages they are visiting on your website, you can then try to refine it and will boost up your online success.