Promotion - Understanding your Visitor's Traffic Patterns

Understanding your Visitor's traffic patterns is a crucial component of your marketing strategies. The information in the log reports is collected when visitors find and move around your site at their own volition. So, it's "market research that cannot lie" - and therefore provides unprecedented insights that can help you to strategize not only for the future development of the site itself, but also for your overall business and marketing plan.

Here I describe the most important sections of the log report when analyzing your site's marketing effectiveness. Often, deciding what's right and what's a problem is a gut feel that you'll develop by looking at your log reports over a period of weeks or months, by trying new tactics, and by observing the trends and results.

Traffic 
This Traffic section shows the overall traffic to the site, including the number of actual visitors, as opposed to "hits". This is an important distinction - one hit is generated for every page and every individual image that a visitor requests (e.g. a page with some text and five pictures will take six hits to download). So, the ratio of hits to individual visitors can be quite high.

By the way, it's also important for you to appreciate this distinction if you are selling advertising space on your site. You may be asked by a potential advertiser to prove your traffic levels, and if you happily say "millions of hits", they may look suspicious!

Referrals - Top Referring Sites
These are the Web pages that send visitors to your site. The largest figure here will usually be the "No referrer", showing people coming directly to the site. This means that they are typing in your URL, or have your site bookmarked, and implies that your other forms of marketing are working.

The log reporting should display other Web pages that send you traffic as html links. This will show the effectiveness of your reciprocal links or paid advertising. You will also be able to see other sites that are linking to you. It's worth checking these out if you aren't familiar with them - either to thank them, or to check that their link to you is appropriate.

For search engine referrals, it's possible to review keywords that are bringing traffic from one particular source, and to try to improve the site's performance for those words in other search engines.

Referrals - Top Search Keywords and Phrases
This is crucial information, as it shows exactly what people were looking for when they came to your site. Often during design it is best guess at which keywords should be targeted, but because the search engines index every word on all your pages, other terms can be found, especially in a content rich site.

So the most popular search phrases can tell you what's really "hot" in your products and services. Understanding these is another great key to understanding the current needs of your site's market, and making business strategy and development decisions. Until your view the reports, you may had no idea was is most popular.

Tracking
This section shows where your visitors are actually going on your site and the average time spent doing so. This should give some indication as to how engaging it is. If your site is rich in content, but the time spent on it is relatively low, it may not be meeting the needs of the visitors it is attracting, or it may be targeted at the wrong audience.

You may be listed very high in the search engines but when your reports are showing that the average time spent on your site is less than a few minutes - this indicates a problem and your site may not be meeting your visitors needs. Without this evidence from the reports you might have believed that your site was successful just because of a high ranking in the search engines. 

High search engine ranking is important but the bottom line is measured in traffic and whether your site is meeting your visitor's needs.

Tracking - Most and Least Requested Pages
The most requested pages are a great barometer of the "hot" areas of your site, and thus the most popular aspects of your online products or services. These may be different from your original expectations, and so this information can be very valuable for overall business development decisions.