Measuring Website Traffic

So many statistics are available on a site that it can be bewildering and confusing to work out what to measure, what each statistic means and what to do with the data you have.

As Disraeli said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Here we look at useful statistics to use, and how to analyse your traffic reports most effectively:

User Journeys

User journeys is one of the most useful reports about your site. Here you can track every individual site user and see which pages they visited, the journey they took through the site, and how long they stayed at each page.

You can examine any common or surprising trends and patterns, and seek ways to help people navigate their way through the site - for instance if many people use a roundabout route to reach something linked to from the homepage, what can you do to make that content more prominent?

Top Referrers

This is a list of the websites that are driving traffic to you. Typically you will see search engines towards the top of this list; but you might be surprised at who else is referring traffic to you.

If you have paid for listings elsewhere or have link partnerships, you can use this report to see if you are actually gaining traffic from your referral schemes - therefore this can be an important report.

Searches

You may have an internal search engine, in which case see what searches people are performing and how you can best route them to the relevant content, or indeed to identify content gaps in the existing site that can be plugged.

Look at search engine queries that are reaching your site - are they on terms you would like or a little more surprising or obscure? Take measures to ensure that you give yourself the best possible chance of getting traffic for searches relevant to your site

Top Pages

One of the most standard but useful reports, this shows you how much traffic each page is getting. If pages near the bottom of the hierarchy are getting a lot of traffic, this suggests they may be more important to site visitors than you initially anticipated, and should therefore consider raising their profile on the site.

Similarly if there are top level pages getting little traffic, why is this? They might not be that important or at least not often viewed, but it could be the text is poorly written and turns visitors away.

Countries

If you have the data available, seeing the countries that people visit your site from can be very interesting - there might be a few surprises. If you find a large percentage of your audience comes from overseas then consider if you can do things to help them with your site - for instance displaying prices in more than one currency could be a good measure to take.

Sales Pages / eCommerce

With any sales process, it is critical that you map and track the most common paths to purchases on your site. Imagine you have a four step sales process, and note that the drop off between step two and step three is 90%.

You need to ask why this is - have customers just had a surprise like seen the price for the first time? Or, more likely, that step is confusing, too long or the call to action is not clear. Any sharp drop off should be investigated and steps taken to try to improve.

Monitor the drop off after the changes and you should see an improvement in overall conversion. Sales and ecommerce processes should definitely be checked in this manner as you may be losing sales just through poor design, despite an excellent product that the customer really wants.