Analyzing Key Metrics in Your Web Site Traffic Reports – Part 2
This is the second part of a report produced by John Webster from AIM IT looking at the key metrics in web site traffic reports.
If you haven’t done so already, read part one – Analyzing Key Metrics in Your Web Site Traffic Reports – Part 1.
Referral Report
This important report shows how visitors found your web pages. There are only three ways people can get to your web site:
- Click a link on another website
- Click a link in an email
- Type your web site address into their browser address box or select from their favourites list.
The first two should generate the vast majority of traffic to a web site and this report enables you to assess how your site performs against this metric.
The report specifies the individual sites that referred traffic to you as well as quantifying the number of referrals.
Links from other web sites
SE Referrals
A well constructed and implemented web site should expect 50% – 70% of its traffic to come from the SEs.
You should find that there are many individual SEs referring traffic to you. Every country version of the major SEs will be separately identified, so you could see dozens of different Google, Yahoo, etc. sites referring to you. Then there will be other SEs only identified by a number (Eg. http://64.233.179.104 and http://72.14.207.104 are both Google web addresses).
Other web site links
You may find there are links on other web site pages that generate considerable traffic. These are worth exploring. The links from other web sites are not necessarily to your home page. If you overhaul your site, the linked page on your site could be renamed or deleted, in which case the referring link would no longer be correct and you could lose traffic.
Links in Emails
This metric becomes more important if you use email programs to promote your web site. Email link referrals can be identified in the report, as the referring sites will have names like:
hotmail.msn.com
mail.google.com
bigpond.com/webedge/do/mail
mail.yahoo.com
mailcenter.comcast.net
Example – Getting it wrong
We audited a training company web site in Aug 05. An essential element of an audit is research to identify and quantify relevant search phrases actually used to find information pertinent to a client’s products or services. This provides a benchmark of the opportunity for the client’s site.
In this example, we identified 303 search terms used by Australians on 50,000 occasions in one month to find the sort of information the site contained.
Against this performance benchmark, an analysis of the client’s Referral Reports showed:
Clearly, the site had major problems but they subsequently got worse!
Of the 574 referrals from sister company A web site, various pages were subsequently removed that had generated 213 of the referrals in this report.
To further compound the problem, all links from the web sites of sister companies B and C were also removed after this audit was completed.
Essentially, this site is now only visited by the company’s existing customers who know its web address or people who find it from links on one sister company’s web site.
Unique Search Words Report
This report should list and quantify all the search words that were used in the SEs to find any of your web pages then click through to them.
This report helps you assess:
- Can your site be found easily in the SEs?
- Are you attracting the right visitors?
Can your site be found easily in the SEs?
This report shows the broad brush assessment of the total number of search phrases used in the SEs to find your web site.
There are many factors that will impact on your results. Three of the main factors are:
- Size and competitiveness of different search markets
- Size of your own web site.
- The ability of your site pages to rank well to relevant search phrases.
Size and competitiveness variations in different search markets probably comes as no surprise but web site size is a factor few people consider.
The reason is simple, all other things being equal, the biggest website is going to win in the SEs because it contains more pages that can target more search phrases than a small web site.
Example 1 – Getting it right
The best example I can give, that removes the first variable from the equation completely is a client who publishes two web sites, both aimed at the same search audience.
The characteristics of this search market are that it is quite small and relatively uncompetitive. Irrespective of your particular industry, if your search market has similar characteristics, then these numbers may have some comparative relevance for your web site.
This client has a corporate web site and a “newsletter” site, which is regularly updated with news articles relevant to Australian marketers and corporate PR staff.
Both of these sites have implemented web marketing strategies that evolved from a SE performance audit and traffic analysis we undertook for them and both use our SE-friendly web page publishing system, so these variables are also minimised.
Example 2 – Getting it wrong
The traffic reports for the training company referred to above shows these figures:
* The training company site includes a course database and course registration function that essentially generates a large number of pages visits when any one visitor uses them. We have subtracted these from the page visit numbers to provide a more meaningful comparison with the PR websites.
The search market for the training company is much larger than the PR example and approximately the same in its level of competitiveness.
If your traffic reports show a small number of unique search phrases like the training company, then you can easily see that your site has problems that need to be redressed and you are probably loosing a lot of business.
Are you attracting the right visitors?
I call this a Quality Search Phrase analysis. The information has to be extracted from the Unique Search Words Report but the analysis can identify major problems that when rectified should produce dramatic improvements to your web site traffic and sales leads from it.
Its purpose is to determine how easily potential clients or customers who do not know you or your brands can find your site in the SEs.
Here is what I do:
From the list of phrases in the Unique Search Words report, excluded search phrases that contain:
- variations of your company name and its brands,
- any clients’ names or brands,
- job and work experience search phrases
- general information searchers (Eg terms like “checklist”, “resources”, “guidelines”, etc.)
- Any other phrases that are obviously not primarily intended to find your site’s type of content.
Basically, you are compiling a short list of phrases that indicate the searcher is seriously looking for information about the types of products or services your site contains.
These I define as your “quality” search phrases. If these distill down to a very small number, then this could indicate your web site:
- lacks a viable content strategy,
- its content is poorly written or focused, or
- its pages have poor visibility in the SEs.
The following example shows the results that can be achieved when a problem identified with this analysis is then corrected.
Example
As part of the process of planning a PR companies web site overhaul, we conducted an audit on of their traffic reports in Jul 05. The new site was published in Aug and we audited the traffic reports again in Sep 05.
Audit Results:
Not only did the site increase its total visitors by 37%, it is now attracting more people who are interested in the services provided by a PR company, as is indicated by the 60% increase in pages viewed per visit.
The client also reports a dramatic increase in email and phone enquiries generated from the website after corrective action had been implemented.
The most important remedial actions undertaken in this case were:
- research that identified the search patterns people used to find the services of a PR company
- modifying web page content to specifically targeted the search phrase patterns of the target market.
- installation of our Compad website management system with its enhanced SE visibility capability.
As the SEs are continuously changing their page ranking formula and the web is growing at over 1 million new pages per day, I recommend you conduct this evaluation every three months.
Top Entry Pages Report
This report provides more important information on the visibility of you site in the SEs.
When a site has been planned and targeted at a wide range of search phrases any page of the site may be the most relevant to a specific search. Any page found in the search engines can then become the first point of entry to your site.
When you factor into the evaluation that a certain number of searches will relate to your company name, your home page should be individually the most frequent first entry point but if it is the only entry point or most people enter via this page, you probably have site problems.
Usually the most influential factor in this equation is the size of a web site but sometimes other factors can exert an influence. Basically, the more pages a site contains, the less frequently should the home page be the first entry point.
Examples
The following table shows the frequency with which the home page is the first entry point for a number of our clients’ web sites.
* Site F is the training company used in the Referral Report example. The high home page entry point figure is further evidence of the site’s poor search engine visibility.
If you would like more information or have questions about website traffic reports, web marketing or would like a performance audit of your site that includes identification and quantification of the real search phrases relevant to your products or services, please contact
John Webster
Aim IT
There are two basic principles that web site owners and managers must implement to achieve a maximum return on investment from a web site. They are:
1. Provide information the web users want
2. Deliver content to the Search Engines (SEs) in the format they need
Site owners who observe these rules should expect 50% – 70% of their site visitors to be referred from the SEs.
John has been helping clients improve their web sites’ performance since 1995. His services include:
- Web site performance evaluations
- Web site strategic planning
- Web development project management
- Search engine keyword research
- Content management system evaluations
- Internet marketing training
He is a professional marketer with over 25 years of experience in a broad range of industries including industrial, consumer and service markets.
Clients have included both large and small enterprises.
- Quality Assurance Services (QAS)
- National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA)
- International Accreditation Forum (IAF)
- Network Communications (Public relations company)
- Australian Veterinary Practice Managers Association
- IM3 Inc. (Veterinary equipment manufacturer)
If you would like a free web site performance evaluation, please contact John at:
Aim IT
6 Park Ave,
Gordon, NSW 2072
Ph: 612 9499 3363
Email: jwebster@aimit.com.au
Analyzing Key Metrics in Your Web Site Traffic Reports – Part 1
John Webster is a fellow I recently met through this blog. He came across some of my search engine optimization articles and instantly made contact with me. Turns out John is a super fan of web site marketing and SEO and runs his own firm in Australia called AIM IT.
John sent me through a solid report on analysing the key metrics in website traffic reports that he gave me permission to share with you. If you are at all into web site marketing I think you will find the materials in this report valuable.
Because there was so much content I’ve broken down the report into two parts. You can also find further details about John and his business at the end of the report in part two.
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Web Site Marketing: Get Real Benefits from your Web Traffic Reports
You would not dream of trying to run your business without a range of reports that show you how your sales and promotional activities are performing and your web site should be no different.
I find that many people are unaware of what web site traffic reports do and the essential information they provide so you can assess your online marketing performance. This article addresses the key issues.
What are Web Site Traffic Reports?
Web site traffic reports are usually generated by programs that reside on the web server that hosts your web site. There are specialist services that offer alternative solutions but I am going to focus on the basics.
Every time someone goes to one of your web pages, their browser asks for a copy of the web page file and all the individual image files that are displayed on the visible web page. The request essentially includes the address of the requester’s computer and the web server responds by forwarding a copy of the file(s) to that specific location on the world-wide-web.
A web site traffic program simply sifts through and analyses all these individual requests and responses and provides the information in a number of easy to read report formats.
Can an Individual Web Site Visitor be Identified?
Every time you dial up for Internet access, your Internet access provider assigns your computer a temporary web address and it is this address that is used to identify your computer when your browser requests web page files.
When you close your web connection, the temporary address you had been allocated becomes available for use by another subscriber to the same access provider service, so it is not possible for your web site host server to track the identity of any individual visitor.
Tracking individual users can only be done if the visitor accepts “cookies” and registers for some service when they visit a site, but that is another issue I don’t intend to address here.
When is a “Hit” not a “Hit”?
The term “hit” can cause confusion. If you say that there were so many “hits” on your web site, you are saying that this is the total of all files that were requested by all site visitors and in this use of the term, it includes all image files.
A web page file (also called an HTML file) is not like a Word document in which you can embed images. Web page files do not contain any images. All they contain is text – the visible text on your web page, the HTML code text that tells your browser how to display your web page and instructions to get a copy of any image files from the hosting web server that are to be displayed by your browser as an integral part of the visible web page.
In this context, “hits” has no relevance to web site performance as the number includes all the image files as well as the web page files accessed by site visitors. To double your total site “hits”, all you need to do is double the number of images on every site page.
However, some web site traffic reports may use “hits” in a context that is relevant. Some may report visits to web page files (also called URLs or unique resource locators) as “hits”. In this situation, because all other file types are excluded, “hits” are relevant as the reported number is showing how many times a web page file was requested.
Limitations of Web Site Traffic Reports
The best use of your reports is for trend analysis.
Web site traffic reports are 100% accurate but they are not 100% real. Confused? Following are some of the factors that cloud the reality picture.
Visits to your web site are not all real people. There are many programs released on the web to visit web sites. These include the “goodies” like search engine (SE) robots that automatically crawl the web requesting copies of web page files and the “baddies”, like “sniffer” robots that may visit to seek email addresses for “spam” email generation. You would expect your traffic report program to be installed to exclude reporting visits from the major SE robots but it is not practical to identify and exclude the many other possible non-real visitors.
The visitors by country traffic report is another one that has limitations. Some Internet access providers can assign their subscribers with temporary computer identification that does not enable interpretation by the traffic analysis program. This may result in 15% – 30% of visits whose country of origin cannot be determined.
Then there are the large corporations who often use worldwide networks. In this situation, any employee in any location can be accessing the web via the country location of the head office and will be identified by your traffic reports as originating from that country.
What Web Site Traffic Reports are Essential?
I am focusing on the basics and I regard this as the absolutely essential web site traffic reporting information you need to manage your web site and online marketing.
Online Web Site Traffic reports are typically updated daily or weekly and you would expect to be able to access current month and a monthly history of web site activity for the past year.
You will want access to reports for each month that show:
The big picture – Number of web site visitors, number of pages visited and pages viewed per visit
- Most viewed web pages/download files and number of visits/accesses to them
- Referral report – how many visitors came from search engines and other web sites
- Unique search words – ALL the search phrases used to find your site in the SEs
- Top entry pages – which of your web pages were the first point of entry to your site
The significance of these individual reports is discussed below.
Traffic Reports – The Big Picture
You would want to track the number of web site visitors, the number of pages visited, the pages viewed per visit and the pages viewed per site size at least monthly.
The other element you need to record is the size of your web site, its growth and when content was added, as this will impact on the pages viewed per visit over time.
The need for tracking the total visits and pages/download files viewed/accessed should be obvious but the pages viewed per visit and the pages viewed per site size, warrants some explanation.
Example – Getting it right
The following web site traffic figures are taken from a site that targets Australian marketers and corporate PR staff.
Pages viewed per visit, provides an indirect assessment of the relevance of the site’s content to the visitors. If the SEs are referring a lot of traffic to a site, it is quite possible that many visitors are clicking through but finding the site content not relevant to their specific needs. In this case, you might find a low number of pages viewed per visit, as these visitors will hit their “back” buttons pretty quickly.
The figures for this site suggest the content is relevant to many viewers and the consistent increase in pages viewed per visit suggests the site is targeting the desired audience. However, this metric alone can mask problems that the pages viewed per site size may disclose.
This site consistently increases the number of published web pages and by this analysis there was a 5% decline in the pages viewed relative to the size of the web site in Dec 05.
There are a number of possible explanations for this drop. Typically, there is a total down turn in web usage by Australians in Dec/Jan and the December figure may simply reflect this.
Another explanation may give cause for concern.
Google implemented major changes in Oct 05. They changed how their SE ranks search results and they approximately doubled the number of web pages that they index. When SEs implement changes of this magnitude, pages from your site that previously ranked high to relevant search phrases can drop dramatically in the results ranking and cause a significant down turn in your site traffic.
If this was the reason for the decline, then web site remedial action may have been essential.
Most Viewed Web Pages (or URLs) Report
This is one of those reports where “hits” = pages viewed or download files accessed.
Its primary use is to identify what areas of your site are considered most relevant to site visitors. If people do not go to the pages that are important to you, it may indicate a problem with your site structure, descriptive content or SE targeting.
Possible problems:
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Are the links to the pages you want visited buried too deep?
Is the link text to them obscure and unclear?
Do you include cross-links to them in the pages people are visiting most frequently?
Do your important pages perform well in the SEs?
Continue to Part 2 – Analyzing Key Metrics in Your Web Site Traffic Reports.
