Traffic Analysis Tools

How To Analyse Your Site Traffic?

You need to keep on top of who is referring your visitors to you, what kind of technical capabilities their computers have, where your visitors are from, how long your visitors are staying with you, which pages your visitors are viewing, whether or not conversion goals are being reached.

Find out who is referring visitors to you

hese referrals generally fall into three categories: paid advertising, search engine traffic and natural linking. If you rely too heavily on paid advertising then you need to aim to increase the other two areas. If you rely too heavily on one search engine, and especially one search which only refers your visitors to your home page, then you need to encourage deeper linking as well as researching the reasons why you are only listed with the one search engine.

Archive.org

Find out what kind of technical capabilities your users' computers have.

You need to make sure that the majority of your audience can view your website in the manner that you intend them to see it. If your website is tailored towards an end user with too high a computer spec',

then you must consider how your website will load and view with a lower screen resolution, older browser, different browser and low-speed connection. Likewise, if your website is too basic, then it may turn off too many people people who prefer a flashy, more professional' website. It's up to you to ensure that you strike a balance and appeal to as many people in your chosen market segment as possible.

Alexa.com

Find out where your visitors come from

What's the point in tailoring your product or service offering towards Canadians if all your visitors come from the USA? You need to analyse on a regular basis whether or not your visitors have the potential to make you any money. If not, you need to do two things. This first is, be a lot more proactive with local and category specific marketing. Appear in more directories and discussions relevant to your industry. The second thing is to ask yourself the question, How can I use these visitors to my advantage?' Take time to think about how you could sell any products or services to these people. The least that you could do is collect their personal preferences and contact details with a view to forming a strategic alliance with another company, and making use of the information in the future.

Compare your statistics with your competition

Take time to review how your competitors have amended their own website over time, and view how changes in strategy impacted on their volume of visitors. Archive.org shows you how many websites used to look like. Use Alexa.com to compare the timescale of design changes with peaks and troughs of their site visitors.

Set conversion goals and review their performance

It's so important to make sure that you've got the basics right. Are visitors being turned off for some reason by your home page? You don't want to be succeeding in all the hard work of delivering the right type of visitor to your website and then fail to take advantage of it when they arrive. Make sure that you take the time to study articles on conversion rates. Test different types and designs of forms. Ask your own customers for their feedback. Do whatever it takes to optimize the results of your marketing efforts.

HitsLink.com Website Statistics and Web Analytics

HitsLink.com offer two levels of service to meet your needs:

HitsLink Enterprise - All the features of Hitslink Professional plus conversion tracking of pay-per-click campaigns (e.g. Overture) all the way to orders and even revenue!  You can track user definable events, such as, promotions and downloads as well on your site.

HitsLink Professional - Hundreds of traffic statistics.  Extremely detailed search engine marketing information.  E-mail alerts upon user-definable traffic levels.

Dozens of Reports, Hundreds of Statistics

• HitsLink provides a comprehensive set of reports on your site traffic. 
• Click here for a detailed list.
• Click here for a live demo.

• Get hundreds of statistics in real-time.  There are no logs to read.
• With other products, you must run a time-consuming program to analyze your log files before getting results.
• Our high-capacity network infrastructure even allows for high-traffic sites to receive immediate results.

• There is nothing to install.  You simply paste a small piece of HTML code on each page you wish to track statistics on.
• After pasting the HTML code, you can immediately see your statistics start tracking.

• Referrals and search terms are tracked from hundreds of search engines.
• Tracking is by site and by page for better optimization analysis.
• See your site's link popularity on top search engines.
• See your search engine rankings for your search terms on top search engines.  Compare these to your competitors.
• Research potential click fraud by seeing repeat clicks by IP address, country of origin and more.

• WordTracker is a database of terms that people search for derived from hundreds of millions of searches.  You enter a search term, and we tell you how often people search for it and how much competition there is for the search term.  With this data, we provide a Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) that measures the popularity of a search term against the amount of competition for the search term.  This helps you find niches to maximize your search engine traffic.  This report helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered.  Perform many different style searches, including thesaurus-based searches for the most effective keywords.

• For consultants or webmasters with many sites, you can add unlimited sub-accounts to your main account.  This consolidates billing under the main account and provides substantial cost savings.
  
  Each sub-account has its own private login and password.  Sub-accounts cannot see other sub-accounts, so privacy is maintained.

• You can setup alerts to notify you when certain traffic levels are hit.
• Alerts can be by hour, day, or week.
• Get notified when your traffic spikes!

• All reports can be exported to Adobe PDF, Word, Excel, comma separated, tab delimited, WordPerfect and rich text format.
• Email a copy of any report at any time to multiple recipients.
• Schedule reports for email delivery to multiple recipients.
• All reports can be displayed in printer-friendly mode.

• You can bookmark commonly used custom reports.
• A bookmarked report can be set to display upon each login.

• Combine several reports into a custom dashboard.
• All charts have extensive customization capabilities.
• Show or hide charts and data tables.
• Add multiple filters to reports.
• Sort by different columns.
• Change chart types.

• If you are unsatisfied with our service for any reason during the first month of operation, simple e-mail support and we will fully refund your fee, no questions asked.

Sending 404s Where They Wanted To Go

By William Bontrager

You know those "404 not found" messages you get when you type an incorrect URL. Do your site visitors see that ugly thing?

There's a simple two-step solution.

(1) Create a page that you want your visitors to see instead of the default error page. Upload it into a directory somewhere.

(2) Put an .htaccess file into your root directory. (Yes, the first character of the file name is a period.) Your root directory is where your index file is, the page they get when people use the URL http://www.yourdomain.com/

If the directory already has an .htaccess file, update it. Otherwise, create it.

Add this line to the file (with the correct directory path and HTML file name):

ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/wrongurl.html

"ErrorDocument" tells the server what follows is a method of handling errors. "404" tells the server what type of error the method is for. "/path/to/wrongurl.html" is the directory path and file name of the method; in this case the method is your custom "404 not found" page.

Use a word processor which saves as ASCII/plain text. And upload the file as text.

Within a few minutes of uploading .htaccess, incorrect URLs will be redirected to your new error page.

That's all you have to do.

The above works with Unix/Apache servers. If you don't know whether or not your server qualifies then just go ahead and do the steps above. If it works, your server qualifies. If it doesn't work, nothing happens; it won't hurt your server.

Want something more elegant?

Elegance is a program which scans the incorrect URL and automatically redirects your site visitors to where they really wanted to go.

Introducing ... (drum roll, please) ... Master404 !!!

The newly released Master404 is customizable to your site.

You design your own "404 not found" page, as above. The page can have links to different areas of your site, or whatever.

Periodically, you use your browser and view the incorrect URLs people are using. And you assign them to the URLs of the correct pages.

After that, whenever that incorrect URL is used, the visitor is automatically redirected to the page they really wanted to go to. If no correct page has been assigned to the incorrect URL, then the visitor is redirected to your custom "404 not found" page.

Master404 can be found here . It comes complete with do-it-yourself manual and examples. Best of all, it's FREEEE!!!

If you need help with it let me know.

About the Author:

William Bontrager Programmer/Publisher, "WillMaster Possibilities" ezine mailto:possibilities@willmaster.com

Are you looking for top quality scripts? Visit Willmaster and check out his highly acclaimed Master Series scripts. Some free, some for a fee.