Knowledge is power...
Power to boost income.
It has cost you time and money to generate your INCOMING
traffic. Your outgoing traffic generates income for you. You can measure both…
income minus expenses equals profits.
If we stopped here, your site would be a black box. A “black
box” is a concept used in physics. You can measure what goes into the black
box, and you can measure what comes out of the black box... but you don’t know
what the heck is happening inside of that black box. In other words, you don’t
know why things happen.
And for your long-term success, that’s critical. Why?
Because if you know more about the nature of your INCOMING
and OUTGOING traffic, you can maximize your returns for every dollar and minute
that you spend!
Yes, that is kind of important... “critical,” even.
And what do you need to know?
1) Traffic
2) Links in
3) Links out.
Let’s start peeking inside your “black box” by studying your
traffic... Traffic, of course, is your lifeblood. You need the means to do some
“blood tests” to determine your site’s health.
Unfortunately, all the traffic analysis packages out there
are written by techies... for techies. They give you so much data... just
because they can! But all you need to know is... what you need to know! You
need information, not reams of useless data.
The key to traffic analysis is to simplify. Forget the 150
different ways that traffic-analyzing software slices and dices hits, visits,
pages, page views, and visitors. You simply don’t need to know how many
left-handed Norwegians visit your site between 3-4 AM on Sundays.
So let’s prune away all the useless data, and keep just the
“need to know” information...
Analyze Your “Big
Picture” Traffic Stats
First, the big picture...
All traffic-reporting software packages cover the basics...
average number of visits, visitors, and pages viewed per day, as well as the
totals on a per-month basis. Here’s what those terms mean...
----------
Ethically Spy on Your Site's Visitors, Increase Signups and Sales Conversions, Site-Usability, and Know Exactly What Your Visitors Want!
----------
• Visits -- the number of visits to your site
• Visitors -- the number of different people who visit your
site (ex., a visitor could account for 10 visits)
• Page Views -- the number of pages viewed by all the
visitors during all the visits. A single visitor might view only one page... or
twenty.
Question: What about hits? Everyone talks about hits!
Short answer... forget hits.
A hit is simply a line in your site’s log file. If a page
has 3 graphics on it, that’s 4 hits (1 for the html page itself, plus 3 for the
graphics). But if that same page has 100 graphics on it, that’s 101 hits!
See why the number of hits is a useless stat? Yes, but why
does everyone quote hits, then?
Two reasons... either they don’t understand the term, or
they understand it and use hits because it sounds bigger! In any event, “hits”
is a useless thing to measure to understand your traffic.
By comparing your monthly “big picture” data, you should be
able to see steady growth in your site’s overall traffic. If not, the “patient”
needs a good dose of traffic-building medicine (luckily, that medicine is
nearby... just above, actually!). Ongoing traffic-building is a good idea even
if traffic is building nicely -- you can never have too much!
Now that you have the big picture, it’s time to delve inside
and pull out some important details...
• Daily statistics -- visits, visitors and page views must
be reported on a day-by-day basis, in both absolute terms and as a percentage
of the total (ex., percent of total visitors). If you do a special traffic
promotion on a certain day (ex., run an ad in an e-zine), a daily statistic
report is an easy way to gauge the response.
• Most popular pages -- your page view stats must be
delivered on a per-page basis, with the page generating the most page views
reported first. By understanding which pages are most popular, you understand
better the needs of your visitors. Correlate this with your link-tracking data
(more on this below) to make sure that your most popular pages “get the click”
to your incomegenerating programs. Also, use this data to get a better feel for
what your market wants... and, just as important, what it does not want.
• Most popular entry pages -- same as the previous section,
except that this specifically tells you which pages are the most popular
“entry” pages. A page counts as an entry page when it starts a visit. Correlate
this with how people find you (referrers and keywords, discussed just below),
and you have a wealth of insight into how your site is being discovered, and
what people want. Use these conclusions to give you ideas for other related,
profitable areas for content development.
• Most frequent exit pages -- these are the pages from which
people leave your site. Some people look upon high numbers for a given page as
“bad.” But you have to correlate this with other data. If a “high entry” page
is also a “high exit” page, that’s not really a surprise. If a “high exit” page
is also generating tons of links out to your income-generating programs for
you, that’s not so bad either, is it?
• Referrer URLs -- this tells you where your traffic is
coming from... Search Engines, other Web sites, link exchanges, etc. Extremely
useful info!
• Keyword search -- which keywords are people entering into
engines to find you? That’s what this super-valuable data tells you!
Taken together, referrer page and keyword search data tell
you where and how your visitors find you, which gives you a base to build even
more traffic-building ideas!
As you can see, traffic analysis is actually a pretty simple
task... when you know what you’re looking for, and how to turn data into
information.
Traffic analysis is the base. It tells you what you need to
know about quantities of visits, visitors, and page views. It shows you where
they come from (if via the Web) and what words they used to find you at the
Search Engines. But you need more…
Now that you understand traffic flow, you need to be able to
see exactly what’s working in the two bottom-line areas that matter most...
1) how you spend your traffic-building time and money --
what’s working, and what’s not. Spend only on the techniques that bear fruit.
2) how you make your money -- gear your content more and
more towards what gets the click. Because that’s what builds your income.
So how do we get this information? Through two forms of
analysis that are specialized for content sites like yours...
• Click IN Analysis
and…
• Click Through Analysis
Before we go further, let’s talk about two different kinds
of links...
1) OFF-SITE links that bring traffic IN to you
2) ON-SITE links that send traffic OUT.
OFF-SITE links do not appear on your Web site. People will
not actually click upon these links while they are on your site. Rather, your
potential visitors see these links off your site... in e-zine ads, or offline
print ads, in flyers that you
distribute at trade or hobby conventions, or in your sig
file (at the end of your e-mail). And they’ll use these links to come into your
site.
Since you spend time and/or money on these traffic-building
activities, you need a way to measure this, to track which off-site promotions
are working, and which are not. Once you know which of your expense-generating
activities work and which ones don’t... you know where to spend your
promotional time and money! And where to stop! You build upon your successes
and fix your weaknesses. Let’s contrast that with ON-SITE links...
ON-SITE links appear on your site, and send visitors out of
that page. These links all go to income-generating sites (merchant-partners via
affiliate programs, your own online store, or your own sales site for products
that you have developed). In other words, ON-SITE links generate income.
No comments:
Post a Comment