Staring at Traffic

by Dan Burbank

I once worked in a building where the offices were perched high enough so that you could sit at your desk and watch the traffic roll by on a busy highway a few hundred feet away. You could see the morning rush fade, a speeder get pulled over and a fender-bender set off afternoon gridlock during the course of a normal workday. It could serve as a nice distraction, but you never really learned anything staring out those windows.

Do you do the equivalent with your Web site traffic? You're a savvy webmaster so you avoided an amateurish counter on your site and went straight for some decent tracking software. You're getting some good data about your site - pageviews, unique visitors, referrers. So what? Are you staring or do you analyze?

Here are some tips to help you take action on facts that might reveal themselves after you stare at your traffic.

No traffic here

If your numbers are so low that you know you personally accounted for six of your site's seven pageviews this week, then analysis isn't a problem. First, at least you know the reason the site isn't generating interest or sales is because no one is finding it. Hold off on the emergency redesign and start marketing. Get listed with search engines, try swapping links, add your URL to your business cards, buy keywords on Google, just get that traffic started.

Some site I never heard of is linking to me

First, do your research. Some log analysis tools are particularly susceptible to referrer spam. This technique amounts to getting a bogus reference to pop up in your logs to drive traffic to the referring URL. That web site specializing in penny stocks and mail order brides isn't actually linking to you, they're just using a different spamming technique to fool you. An upgrade to your analytics tool will usually clear this up.

If the link is legit, what is it about your site that made it worthwhile enough for them to post this link? It could be your great content, unique products or unbelievable deals. Thank them, then look for similar sites and ask if they'll do the same.

Visitors go to pages that aren't important to me

That list of 100 lawyer jokes seemed like a funny addition to your site. Now it gets 500 pageviews a day while your homepage sees a fraction of that. Maybe it's not that irrelevant, maybe it's the very personal tale of why you got into business for yourself.

Either way, this page is a distraction that deters the visitor from doing what you want them to do. You have two choices; if the page is related to your business, redesign it to push more traffic to an important page. If it was posted as a joke, get rid of it (assuming your site isn't all about jokes), the visitors it attracts aren't interested and it wastes your bandwidth.

Traffic seems to spike on a consistent day or time

Many major web sites report that their busiest time of day comes around noon. It's lunchtime and office workers take a minute to check their email, read headlines or find out if there are tickets left for tonight's game.

Seize your most popular time. Post your best offer, get your best content ready, and make sure something fresh is available. Besides that, does the time tell you anything about your visitors -- are they noontime office browsers, late night teens, weekend warriors?

There doesn't seem to be any growth

You've been looking at the numbers for months and while you're satisfied with the amount of traffic, there doesn't seem to be any growth. Now you've got a marketing problem, but you've got some data to work with. Who are your top referrers? Is there anything they might do to promote you more? Are there sites similar to theirs where you could get listed? Have any recent activities or changes generated spikes in traffic?

Maybe it's time to try an email newsletter or some advertising. Now that you're analyzing your traffic, you'll know if it works or not.

07.05.2007. 23:58

Web Hosting Master on 17.09.2007. 13:21

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