The Art of Traffic Analysis

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by Fawad Ahmed

A long time ago, when I was just a net rookie, I thought a counter was the coolest thing in the world. A small line of code and "presto!", instant hit-o-meter! A few months passed by, and now with hit stats in hand, I felt confident enough to approach a major advertiser. Here is a brief recap of the phone conversation I had that "fateful" evening:

Me: Would you be interested in advertising on my site? I get X hits per day.

Potential Advertiser: That's great, son. How many page views? Whoa, stop the press! Page Views? What the heck are those? My little Internet world was rocked.

Let's digress to analogy for a moment. You see, in medical school, there are two distinct phases of education. In the first two years, we spend our time reading textbooks, memorizing terms, and understanding basic concepts. It is said we learn the "Science of Medicine" during this phase. In the last two years, we spend more time in patient care settings, where we apply our training to real life situations. In this second phase, we learn the "Art of Medicine".

Like Medicine, there is a Science and Art of Traffic Analysis. Let's begin with the Science.

A basic hit counter will register a hit every time a page loads. It's the most basic, and most useless form of traffic analysis. A log analyzer organizes your log file data into meaningful statistics. Webtrends, Linktrakker, Faststats, and Website Reporter (my favorite) are among the more popular ones. Regardless of which analyzer you choose, the basic information is the same. Here are the main statistics you should be aware of:

Hits
This stat is the one Webmasters brag about the most. The reality is you get a hit every time a visitor comes to the same page, and you also get one for every image and script that is executed, too. Maybe I'll stuff my first page with 100 images, and soon I'll be up there with Yahoo! Not quite.

Unique Visitors/Sessions
The number of unique visitors to your website in a given time period.

Page Views
The amount of Web pages on your site that were visited. Unlike hits, images are not included.

Referrer Link
Who is sending you traffic. The good log analyzers will give you extensive detail, such as which keyword the visitor used to find you in a search engine.

Code 404
Let's call it 911. This is a file that a visitor looked for on your site but was not found.

The Art

Use Sessions, not hits to gauge your online success.

Divide Page Views by Sessions. If the result is 3-4, it's safe to say your visitors are interested. If its closer to 1, this means they are flying away at the first page. Consider major redesign.

A corollary of #2: if you have a lot of sessions, think about approaching an advertiser. If you have a good amount of page views, you'll be able to sell ads deep into your site.

Monitor your referrer links. You can target your marketing campaigns to the best referrers. This will save you a bundle in advertising costs. Tip: to track newsletter ad traffic, use a "?" at the end of the link. Example: www.yourpage.com/index.html?code

Replace that 404 page quickly! Maybe that missing page is sitting at #3 in Northern Light (happened to yours truly).

There is much more useful information to be gathered from your logs. I have mentioned some of the major points. Many Internet marketers have not yet mastered the science of traffic analyses, let alone the art. When I do site reviews, I still see counters and free tracking services being used. Both appear unprofessional and do not offer in-depth statistics. It's time to graduate from the freebie and invest in a log analyzer. The investment will pay for itself many times over.