Website Traffic Info
The Facts About Targeted Web Site Traffic
You hear it all the time. "You have to get targeted web site traffic." Can't
argue with that. The problem is, not everybody agrees on what "targeted"
web site traffic really is. While I am not suggesting that the views presented
in this article are by any means the be all and end all, I hope that these
opinions and observations will give you some food for thought. As to this
article being about "facts" of targeted web site traffic, well, I'll let
the reader decide if indeed they are factual or just opinion. Testing will
be your only real clue.
The so called "technical" definition of targeted web site traffic is traffic
that specifically is looking for the product or service that you happen to
be selling on your web site. Seems simple enough, wouldn't you say? On the
surface, it would appear that there could be no argument as to what targeted
web site traffic really is. Well, I'm going to blow that theory out of the
water with an example of "targeted" web site traffic that isn't so targeted.
You're running an Adwords campaign. Your product happens to be a natural
cure for acne. So in your Adwords campaign you use the following keywords,
acne, acne cure, acne treatment, acne remedy. You're pretty new at this so
you leave it at those few keywords. Now, on the surface, it would appear
that these keywords will get people who are interested in what you have to
offer to your site. Except there's a major flaw in this "targeting" of keywords.
You've left out one very important word. Know what it is? It's the word "natural"
which is after all the treatment you're offering. So what do you think is
going to happen? People are going to come to your site, see that your treatment
is "natural" and turn away because they don't believe in natural cures. They
want some strong medicine to get rid of their acne.
Now, you have to admit, Adwords advertising is probably one of the most targeted
forms of advertising that you can use, and yet in this case, you're not really
getting targeted traffic to your site. At least it's not as optimized as
possible.
Granted, this is a rather extreme example. You would like to think that somebody
running an Adwords campaign for a natural acne cure would use the word natural
in their ad. But not everybody is an expert at Adwords advertising.
The problems with targeted traffic get even more complex when you have a
web site that doesn't deal with just one particular product or service. What
do you think will happen if your web site is an entertainment web site that
doesn't really specialize in any one particular thing. Let's say you have
movie reviews, a section on DVDs that you sell through Amazon, music reviews,
and so on. You may get people coming to your site who are interested in the
general category of entertainment, but you have no idea what these people
are specifically interested in. They may ultimately find nothing on your
site that they are interested in since entertainment is such a broad category.
My point is this. Your targeted traffic is only going to be as targeted,
or pinpoint, as the kind of site that you have and the quality of your
advertising, even under the best of conditions.
This is why so many people complain that their site is getting lots of visitors
but not making any sales. The problem may very well be that the traffic they're
getting isn't as targeted as they think.
So, do your homework. Make sure your ad campaigns are solid. Make sure your
site description is as clear as possible so that people have a good idea
of what they'll find when they get there. The better job you do on these
things, the better your "targeted" traffic will be.
Web Site Traffic Stats
If you have your own web site, one of the most important things you need
to do is track your web site traffic stats. Otherwise, you will have no way
of knowing how much traffic you're getting, what kind of traffic it is and
where it's coming from. Any successful businessman will tell you that not
knowing these stats is an invitation to failure. This article will alert
you to some of the things you should keep track of and how you can find this
information. Hopefully, this information will help you fix whatever is wrong
with the traffic you're getting, or not getting.
If you have a professionally hosted web site, you don't have to look far
to find your traffic stats. Most professionally hosted sites come with AWstats,
which is probably the most popular traffic stats program on the Internet.
Yes, there are others, and some of them are even more powerful, but AWStats
will be more than good enough for your purposes, especially if you're just
started out, as you'll have all you can handle just trying to understand
these stats.
When you log into your control panel, you should see an icon that says "web
stats" or something like that. If you click on it, you should be brought
to another menu of options. One of these options should read "AWstats". If
you click on that, you'll be taken to the AWStats program. Once there, you
are going to see a page filled with information that is broken up into sections,
which is a good thing because there is a ton there.
The first thing you're going to see is a quick summary of the current month
which will show you unique visitors, number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth.
A unique visitor is one who has visited your site once in a specific time
frame. For most sites, this is determined by daily visits. So if a person
goes to your site 15 times in a day, he's just one unique visitor, but if
he goes back to your site the next day, he's considered a unique visitor
for that day. Some sites will only consider unique visitors on a monthly
basis. You'll have to contact your web host to find out how yours are calculated.
Under that section, you'll have another section of monthly traffic stats.
This will give you the total number of visitors for each month. This is important
to look at so you can see if your traffic is increasing or decreasing. hopefully,
you will see a consistent increase each month.
Below that, you will see a breakdown of the traffic for each day of the current
month. This way you can tell which days of the month are your best as far
as generating traffic. Most people find that during the week is much better
than on the weekends. Of course this also depends on what niche you're in.
There's a lot more on the page which we will get into in our next article.
What we've covered so far should give you a pretty good idea of what you're
traffic is like.
More Web Site Traffic Stats
In the first installment of this series on web site traffic stats, we began
with an introduction to AWStats and what you can expect to find there. In
this final installment, we're going to take a look at the rest of AWStats,
which actually breaks your traffic down quite well. If you can't figure out
how well your web site is doing from these stats then you need to take a
better look. This is actually one very powerful program and I'd be lost without
it.
We left off with looking at the days of the week to see what our best days
are. The next section of AWStats will show you the traffic that you're getting
broken down into the hours of the day. I think you will find that most of
your traffic comes in the morning and evening. During the day is usually
pretty dead with people ar work.
The next section will give you a breakdown of your traffic by country. You
will probably find that most of your traffic comes from the United States.
However, this too will vary depending on the site itself. If you have a site
on German Politics, most of your traffic will probably come from Germany.
The next section will give you your traffic by IP address. I don't really
know why they include this. It's not like you're going to know who these
people are. But it's there if you want it. Personally, I never look at it.
The next section will show you any robots and spiders that have been to your
site. This is important to get your site up the search engine ranks. At first,
you won't have many. But as your site has been around longer, you'll see
more robots and spiders coming to your site.
The next section shows you the duration of visits to your site. This is
important. If most people are at your site under 30 seconds, then they are
not finding what they are looking for. You want the durations to be as long
as possible.
Under that, you will find the pages of your site that people have gone to.
This is important because it shows you the pages of your web site that are
most popular. This way, you can work on improving the pages that aren't getting
as many views.
The next section shows what external web sites your traffic is coming from.
This may be the most important stat on the page. If you are doing external
advertising on other web sites, you want to know that your advertising efforts
are paying off. If you don't see a lot of traffic coming from those sites
then you might want to reconsider continuing your promotions. Conversely,
if you find a site that is sending you a ton of traffic, you want to continue
your efforts there.
You may have noticed that I have skipped a few sections. The reason is because
some of that information I don't really feel is all that important. What
I covered here are the basic things you should look at, with the exception
of the IP address section. I only pointed that out because I don't get it
at all, unless of course you have the time to look up all those IP addresses.
I know I don't.
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