I Want More Web Traffic

A hypothetical conversation between a small business owner and a web developer:

Small Business Owner: More traffic, please. 
Web Developer: What will more traffic accomplish?
Small Business Owner: (deep sigh, wondering if he hired the right person) Everything!  More sales, more contacts, more...everything.

Web Developer: What kind of conversion are you getting now? What page are people exiting your site from?
Small Business Owner: I have no idea.

Web Developer: What web page do they enter from? How many pages per visit?
Small Business Owner: Umm...I dunno.
Web Developer: While more traffic is always a plus, let's first take a look at your stats and see what we can find out about your current traffic.

Sounds like the Small Business Owner may have the right person after all. If you're not converting your current traffic, going after more traffic is putting the cart before the horse.

You should check your website statistics regularly and with purpose.

• How do visitors enter your site? Yes, your home page is probably the most popular (it's printed on your collateral), but take note of which sub pages are in the top tier of visits.
• Number of visits and unique visits. It's possible that half of your traffic comes from your own office. There are ways to eliminate inclusion of your own IPs in the measurements.
• How many "page views" per user? This shows how long or deep users are going into your site. If it's an average of less than two pages per user, you should probably ask why people aren't staying longer.
  • Are they finding what they came for?
  • Is your content holding their attention?
  • Is the site easy to use?
• "Hits" are overrated. Pages that have 40 little pieces of art, an email form and a couple of widgets are going to result in 43 hits - but just one page view.
• Where are your visitors coming from? If it's a search engine, what search term are they using?
• What page are they exiting from? If visitors are leaving from your store or contact page - better look at what's happening on that page that's causing people to leave from there.

You may already have an analytics program in place (such as AWStats or SiteMeter) - and if you don't, Google Analytics is free, in-depth and very useful. Check with your web developer. Ask for help in understanding the traffic pattern.

By doing so, you may start increasing sales and traffic without a complete overhaul or a higher advertising budget.

Comments

[Richard from GoStats]

GoStats.com is a great detailed web stats package. You may find that GoStats has some better and easier to follow features than stat counter or analytics.

[Carolyn Manning]

Thanks, Mike. It's a safe bet that many people don't have a full understanding of how to gauge entry vs exit, page views, time spent, etc. I don't. It's not so much that each piece of the puzzle is difficult, it's figuring out how the pieces fit together as well as how they overlap and intertwine with each other. What you wrote here helped; now I'm a little clearer on what's muddy :)

[Mike Sansone]

Hi Richard, Thanks for the tip. Gonna have to give that a try and hope we can count on your for pointers if needed, yes?:-)

[Mike Sansone]

Hi Carolyn, So many metrics, so little time...and the weather continues to change. We should always gauge where we stand and where we're going, yes? What happens when we lose a piece of the puzzle? Hopefully, Google has Answers.