Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial
information. If your visitors proceed to purchase a product but
then a large majority leaves the site when they get to a
specific page in the order process, you need to know about it.
It could be that this page is confusing or hard to use. Fixing
it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example;
there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your
site visitors.

Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can
study. If you’re not sure where this is, call up your hosting
service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking
your marketing progress. If you don’t have access to website
statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not
get a counter that simply shows how many visitors you’ve had.
You’ll be missing out on vital information that can help
strengthen weaknesses in your site.

A good website hosting service offers traffic logs that provide
an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a web
site from various sources such as search engines, directories
and other links.

Unfortunately traffic tracking provided by web hosting services
is often in the form of raw traffic log files or other difficult
to understand cryptic formats. These log files are basically
text files that describe actions on the site. It is literally
impossible to use the raw log files to understand what your
visitors are doing. If you do not have the patience to go
through these huge traffic logs, opting for a traffic-logging
package would be a good idea.

Basically, two options are available to you and these are: using
a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted
traffic logging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging
service may be easy to use and is generally the cheaper option
of the two. WebTrends Live and HitsLink are two good, remotely
hosted, traffic-monitoring services worth considering. However,
WebTrends Live is a more complicated system and is suitable for
larger ecommerce websites. “SuperStats” is another recommended
traffic logging service.

These services do not use your log files. Typically a small
section of code is placed on any page you want to track. When
the page is viewed, information is stored on the remote server
and available in real time to view in charts and tables form.

Log analysis packages are typically expensive to buy and complex
to set up. Apart from commercial packages there are also some
free log analysis packages available, such as Analog.

A good traffic logging service would provide statistics
pertaining to the following:

” How many people visit your site? ” Where are they from? ” How
are visitors finding your site? ” What traffic is coming from
search engines, links from other sites, and other sources? ”
What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site? ”
What pages are frequented the most - what information are
visitors most interested in? ” How do visitors navigate within
your web site?

Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is
essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return
on investment (ROI) of your web site investment.

The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your website
is analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking
software. The three main statistics that will show your overall
progress are hits, visitors and page views. Hits are tracked
when any picture or page loads from your server on to a
visitor’s browser. Hits, however, can be very misleading. It is
quite an irrelevant statistic for your website.

The statistic that is probably the most important for a website
is Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of two
things. First, how many people are coming to your site, and
secondly how long are they staying on your site. If you have 250
visitors and 300 page views you can figure that most visitors
view one page on your site and then leave. Generally, if you’re
not getting 2 page views per visitor then you should consider
upgrading your site’s content so your visitors will stay around
longer.

If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as
the number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the
good work! Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of
how your site design is going and if your marketing campaigns
are taking hold. Also, a good stat to look for is unique
visitors. Once a person visits your site they will not be added
to the unique visitors’ category if they visit again. This is a
good way to track new visitors to your website.

Page views are a good indication of how “sticky” your website
is. A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number
of Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea
if your content is interesting and if your visitors are staying
on your site for a long time and surfing.

Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly
because of the sheer volume of data available), but they
shouldn’t be. While there are many highly specialized statistics
that can be used for more in-depth web traffic analysis, the
above areas alone can provide invaluable information on your
visitors and your website performance. Remember- this data is
available for a reason. It’s up to you to use it.

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Web site traffic is essential to having a thriving online business. You cannot have enough web site traffic (visitors) unless it is the wrong traffic or you do not want to continue to build your business. Your chances of selling a product or service is proportional to the level of targeted and qualified web site traffic to your site. It is not an easy task getting the right kind of web site traffic to your site. You do not get this web site traffic without expending your time, energy and sometimes hard-earned money.

There are many different ways to generate traffic to your web site. The various web site traffic generating methods and strategies need to be researched, evaluated and implemented to determine which ones will result in increasing your web site traffic and hopefully the sales of your product or service.

Unfortunately, most web site traffic generators take time to produce a measurable result. The time required depends on the method and approach you take. It is easy to give up when the method or approach you take to generating targeted and qualified web site traffic to your site does not result in success.

Testing the different methods and approaches is essential to getting the illusive traffic to your web site. Whenever a method fails to deliver the results you want, try a different one. Keep trying different methods or approaches to generating web site traffic until you find the one that works for your web site.

Some of the more common methods of generating web site traffic include:

* Search Engine Optimization

It is no secret that search engines are the number one traffic generating method for driving visitors to web sites. Search engines are very useful in helping people find the relevant information they seek on the Internet. The major search engines develop and maintain their own gigantic database of web sites that can be searched by a user typing in a keyword or keyword phrase in the search box.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of studying the search engines in an effort to determine how to get your web site to rank high on user searches. Depending on the statistical information reviewed, search engines account for over 80% of the visitor traffic to web sites.

* Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is when an advertiser pays for each qualified click that sends a search engine user (visitor) to the advertiser’s web page. PPC requires the advertiser to bid on key words or key word phrases chosen by the advertiser. There are many PPC advertising services available to choose from. Google AdWords and Overture are probably the two most popular in use today.

The PPC search engine allows you to buy a top position in the search engine results for the particular keyword or phrase you choose. The PPC search engines can deliver targeted and qualified visitors to your web page at an economical advertising cost if you manage the program carefully with a clear objective. PPC provides the advertiser with assurance that their ad is being delivered to the targeted audience.

* Link Popularity

Link popularity is simply the total number of web pages that link to your web page. Link popularity is an extremely important factor that is used by most of the major search engines to rank web pages and web sites. In general, the major search engines consider link popularity a key factor in their algorithms to determine the relevancy of your web page to a particular keyword search query.

Good link popularity is important because it can increase the visitor traffic to your web page. The reputation of your web site (i.e., votes of confidence from other web sites) is a measure of the site’s link popularity. Your web page rank (i.e., the position your web page occupies in a search engine’s results page) to a particular search query can be improved by increasing the number of relevant and quality web sites that have incoming links to your web page.

* Other

The other strategies and methods that can increase the traffic to your web site include: directory listings, writing articles, newsletters, e-mail advertising, classified advertising and banner advertising. These methods should be considered along with the previous ones.

Which of the above methods are best for you? That’s a loaded question and the answer resides in what you are willing to pay, in terms of time, energy and/or money, to get the right kind of traffic. You need to test, test and then test some more.

Copyright (C) F. Terrence Markle - All Rights Reserved

Get my F.R.E.E multi-part series on generating targeted and quality traffic to your web site.

http://www.QuikSystems.com/WST/TrafficSeries.htm

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http://www.QuikSystems.com/EzineSub.htm

About The Author

Copyright (C) 2004 - F. Terrence Markle has worked for over 20 years with public and private companies. He has an MBA in marketing and finance. He has been involved with Internet-related businesses for over 3 years. His primary focus is the marketing of affiliate programs.

tmarkle@quiksystems.com

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Qualified traffic is the lifeblood of any web site today, especially for ecommerce sites that are selling goods or services online. But, many media buyers and/or owners of web sites are paying too much for traffic by relying on top tier PPC (”pay per click”) search engines like Overture or Google’s Ad Words Select programs and others.

There is a new breed of web site traffic brokers emerging in the interactive marketing world that are brokering qualified traffic to the highest bidder on a CPC (”cost per click”) basis. Traffic brokers bypass tried and true business processes by flipping the business proposition 180 degrees. They don’t find clients and then optimize their web site for search engines; they do it the other way around, by developing and optimizing their own domains for top tier search engines and then reselling this traffic by redirecting it to a destination of their choosing in real time.

So, is this process illegal or unethical? It’s hard to say. I don’t believe these processes are more disingenuous than what’s occurring with hidden “sponsorship listings” via top tier search engines, including Yahoo, MSN, LookSmart, Overture, etc. The latter are now starting to take up the lion’s share of the first page on search results — these results are viewed tens of millions of times per day, with many people unaware that the results are “sponsored listings.”

To muddy the digital waters even more, marketing services companies are starting to offer “trusted feed” traffic to companies who want to buy qualified traffic on a CPC (”cost per click”) basis. This process is just starting to take hold in the marketplace and works by a marketing services firm contacting a prospective client and offering them “trusted feed” search engine listings on a top tier web site like MSN or LookSmart on a CPC “cost per click” basis. They (the marketing services firm) then build web site pages for their client that are based on their in-depth knowledge of what the search engines want and then submit these pages to the search engine/directory’s editors who then review the sites, give the “client” a top tier listing site and then share in the CPC trusted feed revenue with the marketing services firm.

It’s getting pretty murky when you start to look closely at what and how traffic originates. I don’t think brokering traffic is bad or unethical as long as the web site that is the final recipient of the traffic is offering goods and services that are identical to the referring web site. And, there is a self-policing component of these types of processes — the traffic brokers want repeat business, so it is in their self interest to make sure the redirected traffic is being sent to a similar web site.

Also, “conversion rates” (the number of people taking a specific action versus the amount of traffic) are rapidly becoming the final determinant of building a sustaining relationship between the traffic brokering firm and the recipient web site. If the traffic coverts then the recipient typically wants to buy more, if not, they will move on to another source — this reinforces the self-policing aspects of the relationship.

So what do you look for if you want to start buying traffic from a web site traffic broker? Price is certainly a large factor in determining what your interest should be; most of us in the traffic brokering business typically offer keyword traffic at about a third or half of what you would pay via a trusted feed setup, or Overture or an Ad Words Select program via Google. Expect to pay more for filtered (”automotive, insurance, telecommunications”) versus unfiltered (”shopping mall type of traffic”) as the former has to be carefully filtered for specific keywords or keywords sets so it can be distributed to a larger number of web sites.

Next, make sure you get a 24/7 reporting capability that enables you to analyze your traffic in real time — this report should show the originating keyword traffic (keywords are always embedded in the search string). And look carefully at your report; proxy traffic (or cached pages) should be filtered out so that there is no more than 5-10% of the total traffic — you can’t get away from having some proxy traffic in this day in age, even AOL is using proxy servers. Finally, look closely at your report. The timelines should have some randomness in the sequences; if you see a traffic report with keyword traffic that is spaced very closely in terms of the timeline, warning bells should go off.

About The Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com a marketing services company which provides strategic and tactical marketing services exclusively to small to medium sized companies. Lee@intelective.com Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications - this article may be reprinted freely, provided this attribution box remains intact. (c) 2001-2002 by Intelective Communications, Inc.

Lee@intelective.com

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