Web Site Traffic Analysis
Web Analytics consists of retrieving and analyzing the information about your Web site's every single visitor and every single action this visitor has made and further using this data to improve your Web business performance. While Search Engine Optimization deals mainly with the mechanical audience of your site (search engine spiders), Web Analytics brings you into interaction with human visitors. So, it is to a great extent subject to human behavior logic and from this point of view is easier to understand. As compared to SEO which primarily targets methods for increasing traffic quantity rather than quality (although traffic quality can be increased with SEO as well), Web Analytics deals mainly with refining and converting the traffic that already has been directed to your Web site. Thus, making it the second stage of the Search Marketing process mainly because web site traffic analysis works with the traffic already formed by your actions in the first stage.
As far as any Internet marketing campaign success depends on your web site visitors’ behavior particulars – web site traffic analysis becomes a vital process. In other words you may check the effectiveness of your pages, links, and campaigns via examination of web traffic statistics.
There are two ways to retrieve visitor data for your Web site. The first is to read the server visitor logs and the second is to use a real-time visitor tracking system. Let’s look closer at these two ways of web site traffic analysis to see the differences and advantages.
Log analyzers
This method of analyzing web site traffic is connected with parsing server access logs. The server makes records when someone has requested a Web page from it. This request is recorded in its raw visit logs. You may think that the server access log contains lots of useful information, and it does. Many programs, called "log analyzers," are able to parse server logs and display the information it contains in a user-friendly form.
But there are some disadvantages in this method of web site traffic analysis as for certain reasons server logs do not often provide information with the precision we want: if visits are made by a person who uses a dynamic IP address (e.g. accesses the Internet via dial-up) will be recorded as made by several visitors; if several visitors working through a corporate network with only one external IP address will be counted visits made by one unique visitor; and if a page hasn't finished (or hasn't even started) loading into the user's browser, the server writes this visit to log as soon as it has sent back the request header. However, the visitor may have not seen this page at all.
These shortcomings are solved in another kind of web site traffic analysis which is called real-time visitor tracking. This second method is an improved system for tracking visits. As we have mentioned before there are special softwares to simplify both of these techniques for web site traffic analysis. If you want a much more affordable real-time tracking solution for your site performance measurement you need a proper tracking tool like
Hitlens . It utilizes another purpose of browser-side scripts: which is to report various data about visitor page views to a remote database, and thus becomes a perfect tool for collecting marketing statistics.
Real-time visitor tracking
Most Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, are able to execute browser-side scripts. That is, when you compose a Web page, you can embed program code that will tell the browser not only to show the page statically on the screen, but to simultaneously perform certain other actions as well.
These scripts are usually used to create on-page animation and they can also be used to process data entered by the user into a form.
This kind of reporting is able to provide a lot more information than simple server logs because the data is gathered directly at the time of visit and immediately at the visitor's computer. This is also the reason why this kind of tracking is called "real-time" tracking.
To sum up, real-time visitor tracking with the help of a tracking script helps you gather more precise and valuable marketing information than the analysis of server access logs.
After you have chosen one of the two ways to retrieve information about all the actions of visitors we can start the web site traffic analysis. There are many factors to look at and to regulate. For example in order to check the effectiveness of your pages - pay attention to how long on average your visitors spend on your site. There are different aspects such as keywords and the traffic they attract, effectiveness of campaigns, links and others which demand your attention and control.
