Monitoring website traffic

If you do not monitor your website traffic regularly then you could be operating blind. Read our quick lowdown on why, what and how you should be viewing your website traffic.

Why we measure

The web is an extremely quantifiable medium. And not all traffic is created equal. We measure in order to find out:

• How many visitors find our site
• Whether these visitors 'qualify' as potential clients
• How they found us
• How long they stick around and what they do
• What proportion go on to perform the task which we set as our objective

All of these measurements tell us how well our search optimisation is working, whether we are persuading the right people to click on search results and how well does our site work to enable them to do what we want them to do.

What we measure

It is possible to drill down to individual visitors and see their behaviour in detail, and through Google Analytics to perform complex analysis of how AdWords perform, but the most common benchmarks used are:

• Unique visitors: the number of people
  who visit our site in a given period
• Bounce rates: the percentage of these who leave again right away is monitored by Google analytics
• Repeat visitors: this is harder to monitor accurately where cookies are blocked by browser settings repeats will be understated
• Where the traffic comes from - links on other sites, search engines or by directly typing in the URL
• For search engine traffic: what terms were used to find which pages
• Page views: how many pages did each visitor look at - an average of 5 is a good benchmark
• Time spent on the site
• Popular routes through the site (might let you make good shortcuts in future!)
• The percentage of traffic that goes on to perform a defined task (for example on accommodation sites a good booking conversion rate might be 2-3%)
• Where people leave the site - did they get lost or frustrated part way through a transaction?

How we measure

There are two sorts of statistics used to monitor web traffic.

• Server based statistics that monitor activity on the server where your site is hosted
• Web browser based statistics that hold information externally and interact with your site through code added to the pages

We recommend the second of these which offers a much richer source of information about how visitors interact with your website. the free options that we recommend and are Google Analytics and Statcounter (which can be upgraded to hold more data for a small monthly payment)

Not sure if you have site statistics in place? Ask us now to install for you - its free for SitesToGo websites and we can add stats to most other types of websites on request.