Web Traffic Data Analysis

Analyzing web traffic helps improve web presence.

If you create website content or change the keywords on your website, you need to measure whether those changes are making an impact on the web traffic you are targeting. Web traffic is easy to measure with free analytics tools that directly track the visitors and interactions on every page of your site. If you're not measuring and analyzing your web traffic, you won't be able to effectively grow and expand your web presence.

Organic Traffic

When analyzing web traffic, you may find that search engines are sending much of your site visitors. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps you to gain the rankings and targeted traffic you seek from search engines. Organic traffic is free and primarily dependent on how well your content, titles, keywords, meta descriptions and other key components are structured to encourage search engine traffic. Even if you are not getting web traffic in the thousands, you need to run reports and measure your organic traffic. The data you analyze for certain keywords will help you determine how your Web pages are faring against other pages on your site.

Paid Traffic

Your paid traffic is important to integrate with your web analytics platform. This helps ensure that your page optimizations are working well in conjunction with any search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns you run. You should never simply look at the clickthrough rate of your SEM campaigns, as this is not an indication whether you are correctly targeting your traffic. The campaign tools available from web analytics allow you to view how your SEM campaigns are faring in relation to your goals and conversion rate of traffic. Getting the paid traffic to download something, fill out a form or create an account are examples of measurable components that mean your traffic converts well on your website.

A/B Testing

You're not getting the full picture of your web traffic unless you're measuring other variations of your landing pages. A/B multivariate testing of your Web pages allows you to determine which page layouts or minor tweaks offer the best conversion for your traffic. Certain versions may have better usability or other features that can increase the loyalty of your visitors, which means more consistent returning traffic. The A/B testing is especially important to measure if you're using SEM campaigns, which means that you're getting more for your investment every time your targeted traffic completes a transaction or has another measurable conversion on your website.

Social Media

Social networks are a powerful resource for free website traffic and are important to measure against each other. If you're using Twitter or StumbleUpon, you need to measure how your tweets are converting, the time spent on the landing page, the exit rate and other factors that can determine whether you're creating targeted tweets. You may discover when measuring your web traffic that social media traffic is one of your largest traffic resources, particularly if your website offers unique and interesting content that's user-friendly to read and browse.

Keywords

Even if you're not using a paid traffic source, you need to pick a few top keywords and keyword phrases that you feel your website should rank for and optimize your site accordingly. You can then create keyword tracking campaigns to determine how well certain targeted keywords and keyword phrases are performing on your website. You don't just want to measure how well your site ranks for the targeted keyword traffic--you also want to ensure that your targeted traffic is converting and spending time browsing your site.

References

• Science Direct: The Role Played by Perceived Usability, Satisfaction and Consumer Trust on Website Loyalty

Resources

• Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Website