Lee Hogan Understanding your Web site’s traffic styles is a crucial element of your advertising and marketing mix. The data in these logs are collected as site visitors find and circulate round your site at their own volition. So, it is “marketplace studies that can’t lie” – and therefore offers extraordinary insights that allow you to strategize not best for the future improvement of the site itself, but also for your usual enterprise and advertising plan. I’ll describe the most critical sections of the log record when reading your web site’s advertising effectiveness.
Often, figuring out what is proper and what’s a hassle is a gut feeling that you will broaden by using looking at your log reports over a period of weeks or months, by way of trying some new procedures, and staring at the traits and outcomes.
General Statistics
This introductory segment shows the general site visitors to the website, along with the number of actual site visitors, rather than “hits”. This is an important difference – one hit is generated for every page and every person photograph that a vacationer requests (e.G. A web page with some textual content and five photos will take six hits to download). So, the ratio of hits to person site visitors can be pretty excessive. By the way, it is also essential with a purpose to appreciate this distinction in case you are selling advertising and marketing area to your website. You may be asked with the aid of an ability advertiser to prove your site visitors degrees, and if you happily say “thousands and thousands of hits”, they will appearance suspicious! This section also shows the common time spent at the website, which must supply a few indications as to how engaging it is.
If your site is wealthy in content, but the time spent on it is highly low, it may no longer be meeting the wishes of the site visitors its miles attracting, or it may be focused at the incorrect target audience. I had a consumer who earlier this yr placed #1 in some foremost search engines. He becomes ecstatic! But his website online had not been worked on for some time and turned into very dry and uninteresting. We found from his logs that the common time spent on his web site become much less than two minutes – manifestly indicating a hassle. And to make my point once more, without this evidence from the logs, he would have continued to accept as true with that his web site was a hit.
Most and Least Requested Pages.
The most asked pages are an extraordinary barometer of the “warm” areas of your site, and accordingly the maximum popular components of your online products or services. These can be distinct from your unique expectations, and so these records can be very valuable for ordinary commercial enterprise development selections. If the least requested pages (i.E. Those that attract the fewest site visitors) incorporate essential content, then something’s wrong. Usually, it is both that their content material isn’t always interesting in your markets in the end, or that the website is not driving your site visitors to those pages in approaches which might be attractive.
Top Entry and Exit Pages
If the inner pages of your site are properly promoted in the serps, there have to be some of the top entry pages (i.E. The primary web page that the traveler sees), in addition to the home page. This is a superb reminder to encompass clear navigation back to different regions of the website from each page, to ensure that the first-time traveler gets a whole picture of your offerings. The pinnacle exit pages are also an illustration of your website’s effectiveness – if those aren’t the proper locations for most visitors to leave from, some modifications are needed. Make sure that each page of your web site has an objective, and that you, in reality, direct the traveler to the following web page or to the movement which you wish them to take.
Single Access Pages
These are pages that a traveler views, and leaves without exploring any further. Typically, this could be the house web page, and I am frequently asked whether that is trouble. I usually deliver the standard consultant’s answer: “It relies upon…” Your domestic web page should speedily show the unique audiences to your site that they’ve come to the proper location for what they need, and in which to go to find it. So you would possibly have sections for participants, potential contributors, journalists, consumers, and so on. The domestic page has to do sufficient to engage them and ship them on to the precise interior pages. If the home web page does a great activity of this, there will probably be some remnant of site visitors who came on your site by way of mistake, in which case they will go away immediately. But it really is OK – they aren’t the proper traffic for you. It’s, in reality, your judgment call as to what constitutes trouble. But, that customer I mentioned earlier whose visitors spent less than mins on his website also had approximately eighty-five % unmarried get right of entry to figures on his home page – a few things are obvious! A splash entry web page to your website (i.E. One which says “Welcome, input right here”, but with little or no real content material) will frequently additionally display huge single get right of entry to figures. Although these pages can look very putting, they unluckily tend to be unpopular with impatient surfers. I’ve seen splash pages which have lost one 0.33 of a website’s traffic. If you’ve got a touching page, take a look at the unmarried get admission to figures for it in your logs, and be prepared to put off it without hurting the emotions of your Webmaster!