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Traffic Statistics

Traffic, of course, is your lifeblood. You need the means to do some "blood tests" to determine your site's health. That's what this section is for.

Keep this window open as you review your traffic stats. It will guide you through "what means what" and how to interpret the data.

Let's take a look...

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Clicking on the "Traffic Stats" link in Site Central takes you to a page that summarizes your traffic stats on a month-by-month basis. Clicking on any "monthly text link" drills you down to detailed traffic data about your site for that month. Traffic stats are updated overnight (Eastern Time North America).

To get out of each level of traffic stats, and back to Site Central, just click on your browser's BACK button.

The key to visitor data is to simplify. Forget the 150 different ways that traffic-analyzing software analyzes hits, visits, pages, page views, and visitors. You simply don't need to know how many left-handed Norwegians visit your site between 3 and 4 AM on Sundays.

Here's what you do need to know in order to improve...

1) Summary Stats -- the first level of traffic statistics reports on the most fundamental traffic stats. On a per-monthly basis, it reports the average number of visits, visitors, and pages viewed per day, as well as the totals for the month. Here's what those terms mean...

• Visits -- the number of visits to your site

• Visitors -- the number of unique people who visit your site (ex., a visitor could account for 10 visits in a month)

• Pages -- the number of pages viewed by all the visitors during all the visits

By comparing the monthly data, you should be able to see steady growth in your site's overall traffic. If not, the "patient" needs a good dose of traffic-building medicine. Review DAYs 7-10 of the Action Guide for that. Actually, this is a good idea even if traffic is building nicely -- you can never have too much traffic!

2) Drill-down Stats -- clicking on the link for any given month brings you a wealth of traffic information...

• Monthly statistics -- summarized again, and elaborated upon (average and max), for easy reference.

• Daily statistics -- visits, visitors and pages are reported on a day-by-day basis, in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the total (ex., percent of total visitors). If you did a special traffic promotion on a certain day (ex., ad in an e-zine), this is as easy way to see what the response was.

  When you're first starting out, you may see that you had 25 visitors but only 20 visits one day. It's possible to have more visitors than visits because Search Engines and RSS aggregators (if you set up RSS/Blog It!) are counted in visitor stats, but their "visits" are not counted.

  Total Unique Visitors and Visitors per Day, in the Monthly Statistics, will usually be less than the Visitors in the Daily Statistics. Why? Because a visitor can be unique on the first of the month, and against on the last day of the month. But that person can only be unique once in the Monthly stats.

  So a large discrepancy is a good thing. It means that you have a lot of returning visitors, people who trust what you have to say and get value from it.

• Most popular pages ("Top X of Y Total Pages") -- the statistics are broken down on a per-page basis, with the page generating the most page views reported first. By understanding which pages are most popular, you can better understand the needs of your visitors. Correlate this with your link-tracking data to make sure that your most popular pages "get the click" to your income generating programs. You'll see up to 300 pages listed here.

  Note: The reports consider XML files to be pages. Understand, though, that this particular figure does not indicate actual page views to your Web site. Suppose you see 1,000 hits to the XML file of your RSS feed this month, 2,000 next month, 4,000 next month, and so forth. Most of these are automated hits from RSS reader software or RSS aggregators, not visits by humans.

• Most popular entry pages ("Top X of Y Total Entry Pages") -- same as the previous section, except that this specifically tells you which pages are the most popular "entry" pages. A page counts as an entry page when it starts a visit. Correlate this with how people find you (referrers and keywords), and you have a wealth of understanding into how your site is being discovered, and what people are interested in. Which should point you to other related, profitable areas. You'll see up to 100 pages listed here.

• Most frequent exit pages ("Top X of Y Total Exit Pages") -- these are the pages from which people leave your site. Some people look upon high numbers for a given page as "bad." But you have to correlate this with other data... If a "high entry" page is also a "high exit" page, that's not really a surprise. If a "high exit" page is also generating tons of income for you, that's not so bad, either, is it? You'll see up to 100 pages listed here.

• Referrer URLs ("Top X of Y Total Referrers") -- this tells you where your traffic is coming from... search engines, other sites from link exchanges, etc. Extremely useful info! If someone types your URL directly into the browser, that's a direct entry -- so that visit won't have a referring URL. You'll see up to 300 referrers listed here.

• Keywords ("Top X of Y Total Keywords") -- which keywords are people entering into engines to find you? That's what this super-valuable data tells you! You'll see up to 200 keywords listed here.

  Note: The data here provides you a quick summary. For detailed, page-by-page reporting, please see the Keyword Searches Report in SE HQ. It uses more advanced technology and "slices and dices" the data by Search Engine and by keyword.

• Countries ("Top X of Y Total Countries") -- where are your visitors coming from? This is probably the least useful data. Still, if your site has more of a regional appeal, it may prove useful.

Note: Pages are reported as "/page.html." The leading slash ("/") is an abbreviation for...
"http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/"

So "/page.html" means...
"http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/page.html"

If you see only "/," it indicates your home page, or "http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/"

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