- Mar. 15: The State of the News Media
- Mar. 2: Lessons to be Learned by Legacy Media
- Feb. 18: New News Site Mirrors Others
Making the Most of Metrics
How to Measure your Web Traffic and Understand Who's Visiting your Site
By Dorian Benkoil,
for I, Reporter
Whether you’re running a small hyperlocal community Web site or a large regional citizen media site, you can use free or inexpensive tools to measure how many people are visiting your site and where they like to go most.
In the Web world, the art of measuring your traffic is often referred to as “Web metrics” or “Web analytics.” With the right analytics tools, you can also get very specific details in addition to total traffic numbers, including:
- How many visitors are new and how many are returning?
- What are the most popular areas of your site?
- How do people find these areas? Are they coming from your home page or links from other sites?
- How are people using search engines to reach your site?
- Where do they go within your site once they arrive?
Why should you care about keeping track of your traffic? It will empower you to do several things:
- You will be able to tell whether you are drawing the kinds of visitors you want from your community.
- You will be able to improve your site to better give them what they need.
- You will be able to increase traffic.
- You will be able to give accurate information to potential advertisers, sponsors or funders about how your site is performing.
Following are some steps to get you started.
NEXT: Define Your Metrics
Comments
I don’t know about you, by awstats kicks butt IMO. I do like Google Analytics for certain things like the graph that shows returning visitors vs new visitors. But overall I think awstats is much better. The only thing I find weird is no matter which stats program you use, they all calculate different volumes of traffic and some of them there is a huge difference.
Barry,
AWStats is a log file measure, where Google Analytics is cookie-based. They’re different measures, and that’s part of why they show different numbers.
@ Barry, I agree. They all seem to measure different statistics… I’m currently using Google Analytics (GA), which is a great tool (and totally free!).
Google Analytics sometimes has it’s hickups here and there though.
Ps. Google analytics has just got a full redesign, worth taking a look.
I don’t trust these stat programs at all. The best metric system is the number of posters on your forum or buyers in your shop. At least it is “for sure” information.
How about Alexa ranking? It give good stats about your visitors and you can compare your website traffic to any other website which is pretty useful.
@G.T. Alexa is a different game. it’s more about aggregate Web traffic, measured externally, than internal Web stats measured through a Web analytics program
Im new to this and i c an see how this will be extremly helpfull in tracking and gathering key information about what i will need to .
I agree with Barry, I’m new in the Internet, but Google Analytics seems to me more better and useful..there is more information about conversation..
I think that google Analytics is a very nice tool. But currently, I am using statcounter as it is faster, safer and I dont want google to see all my sites.
Yes I understand that tracking traffic is very important. I have been using statcounter for long now and I think its very easy to use.. My stats always inspire me to work more and more. Plus along with the traffic I have alexa tab on my blog, although it doesnt show me how many people visited my site.. but it shows me my alexa ranking
good article.
Thanks, @ray
Statcounter isn’t as powerful as Google Analytics, and doesn’t have the integration. Also, I don’t think it’s quite as reliable, and it’s not as granular.
However, if you do have the privacy concern that Mike Crabbe expresses then it’s right to use another tool. Google does say they won’t every use the data except in aggregate, but who knows for sure? Mistakes can be made.
Yahoo bought Index Tools and there’s been talk of a free version, but I don’t find that pricing on Yahoo Web Analytics yet.
For these purposes I use whos.amung.us well and is final Google Analitics though also laziness each time for this purpose to come into an account. There is still service GoStats.com, but it too not especially convenient…
But, Google Analytics is a fantastic tool as it is - and it’s always improving, but there are a lot of people out there that have created tools to make it even better.
Google Analytics rocks.
Not sure how many of you have ever used Omniture, but it is awesome. It’s scary how much information they can provide about a visitor (state, how often they visit, how often they buy, days since last purchase, etc). Although it’s kind of expensive, it’s a good investment if you’re involved in e-commerce.
There are many applications available that will count visitors, log times, etc. But few are as powerful and accurate as Google Analytics. Hopefully with the MSN / Yahoo merge, they will come up with something as useful.
Nice series of articles. Recently I’ve come across Woopra which seems like an interesting alternative to Google Analytics. Is it something you are familiar with and if so how do you think they compare? The goal setting side of analytics seems to be the most powerful - but also the most complex, hence I haven’t used it a lot yet.
Your article is very informative. Tracking a website traffic is very important for me. It is to think of new improvement…
I have used Awstats in the past but I think anyone that is serious about ebusiness needs to use Google Analytics.
I agree with Barry, I’m new in the Internet, but Google Analytics seems to me more better and useful..there is more information about conversation..
Good Archive. Thank you