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November 04, 2010

3 Ways to Use Web Site Analytics for More Traffic

Traffic is the centerpiece of the internet, influencing the success or downfall of every site in existence. Regardless of your web design skills, if you build a site and no one is around to see it, does it exist? Generating traffic can be extremely difficult for the novice webmaster because there are so may aspects of traffic generation that must be addressed. From social networking to search engine optimization, everyone is trying to find out what works.

Unfortunately, if you are unable to find out what is working, then most of your efforts will be wasted senselessly as your try to decipher the mysterious success you;re having. Fortunately, web hosting plans include applications within the control panel known as web analytics utilities, which are specifically designed to help you figure out the source of your traffic and determine which traffic generation techniques work the best. The following three methods can be used to maximize the benefits of web analytics and their uses.

Analyze Weekly Traffic

Although web analytics give you the ability to analyze traffic on a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule, it is best to view your result son weekly basis. Viewing the results of your SEO or traffic generation campaign will not give you a broad enough realization of what is happening, and viewing it on a monthly basis would require you to sustain a single method of promotion in order to judge the efficacy of the method, which due to time constraints is simply not plausible for most online business owners. Thus., analyzing traffic on a weekly basis, and introducing new traffic generation methods on a weekly basis appears to be the best way to see what is happening in real time.

Check Referrers

Although you may assume that you know the source of your traffic based on your recent promotion methods, the fact is it is impossible to know for sure without checking the referrers. A lot of people make the mistake of attributing their traffic success to the wrong source and then pursuing that avenue erroneously only to find that it was not that cause of their original success. To avoid this, check the referrers on a daily basis and focus on the traffic sources that are performing the best.

Generate Monthly Reports for Long Term Analysis

Although weekly analysis appears to put things into perspective a lot better, generating monthly reports is very important to the long term success of your business. Many web analytics applications include an extensive amount information on their monthly reports which are not included on the weekly reports. For example, you can get a better picture of traffic trends related to media events during that month by using monthly reports. Weekly reports should be use to analyze should be used to improve short term success, while monthly reports should be use in retrospect to teach you about your mistakes and beneficial decisions during the previous month. In order for this method to be effective however it is important that you keep track of every technique you use throughout the month.

Tags: generating traffic,  social networking,  SEO,  search engine optimization,  control panel,  analytics utilities,  traffic generation methods,  referrer