How effective is your web communication? A good web traffic report can tell you

Posted 09/17/2009 in: Web communication & marketing | 0 Comment | Permalink

Unlike a printed brochure or print marketing campaign you can evaluate the success of an online campaign almost instantly. All you have to do is analyze your web site traffic report.

Online solution or installed software?

Web traffic reports are generated by analytical software. Most web hosting companies provide basic reports, but these are often difficult to understand. It is better either to install a third-party software on your server or to subscribe to an online web analytics solution that will only require adding a piece of JavaScript to your web pages.

• An online solution will only be able to analyze the traffic related to your pages.
• An installed software will do this but will also tell what is happening on your server: it can report statistics about file downloads or uploads; which search engine crawlers visited your site and when; etc.

Report analysis

So, how do you evaluate communication from a web traffic report? Look for the followings:

• Exit pages: If the majority of your visitors leave the site from the home page, this is not a good sign.
• Number of pages visited during one visit: Too few pages can be a good sign or a bad sign depending on your web site’s purpose. For example, if your site is for people to find an answer, a 2 or 3-page/visit shows that your user interface is very effective.
• Most popular pages: Are visitors visiting the pages you were expecting them to visit based on your marketing or communication strategy? If not, you may be attracting the wrong audience, or links to some pages may be too prominent, or people might just not care about some your services!
• Time on a page: Pages where people stay for minutes and not seconds are typically the ones that they read through.
• Keywords: Are people finding your site from the right keywords? You may find that some keywords generate high traffic to certain pages, but for the wrong reason.

These are only a few out of many data you can get from a web traffic report. Analyzed correctly, they will let you quickly determine whether your web site or advertising efforts are giving you the results you were expecting. If not, you will have adjust your web site appropriately until the statistics demonstrate that you have it right.

As a web traffic report can be very confusing and can mean different things depending on how it is analyzed, you should always ask for professional advice.