Ever had too much of a good thing – and ended up with a headache?

Sometimes a simple task that was supposed to take just a few minutes ends up taking hours. The end result? Nothing but frustration.

Those who are responsible for marketing their company's website know that somehow, somewhere there is a wealth of data about their site. It has been rumored that the data in those reports contain insightful information about who, what, when where and why your potential customers are coming to your site.

The truth is that the information contained in your website usage logs can actually make for some very interesting reading. The problem is that these reports are often written by engineers for other engineers.

We'll explain how to distill and digest this information overload and, more importantly, how to turn this data into action items that will improve your web site.  Actually it's quite easy to make sense of these reports once you know what to look for. Follow along and we'll give you a guided tour through the most useful information in those boring site traffic usage reports

Actionable Information from Your Site Usage Reports

Site usage reports are generally compiled by your website hosting provider. A username and password are required to access this information. Ask your site developer for this login combination. Also ask for the website address where this information is stored.

The amount of information contained in the usage reports varies greatly depending upon the service that your hosting provider uses. The most common report providers are Webalizer, WebTrends and AWstats.

Concentrate On What is Most Useful to You

Each of the statistical engines provides a wealth of data. Fortunately, you can ignore most of the reports and concentrate on the ones that will be truly useful to you.

Listed below are the 5 reports that are most relevant to gaining actionable information:

• Monthly Summary

• Monthly History

• Popular Pages / Entry & Exit Pages

• Referrers

• Top Keyphrases

We'll point out the things to look for in each of these categories and will explain how to turn raw data into action items that will improve your web site.

Monthly Summary

The most important figure is the number of “unique visitors” to your site. A unique visitor is someone who is coming to your site for the first time in a given day. The site usage engine recognizes these people by their unique IP address. These people will only be counted once in a day no matter how many pages they view on your site. This is the most interesting number for gauging traffic on your site.

For example, if your log shows 20 unique visitors but 200 page views, that means that an average of 10 pages are viewed by each visitor. A site with a high ratio of visitors-to-page views means that your site is interesting enough for people to “stick around” and gather information.

A small visitor-to-page ratio means that you need to work on making your site more compelling. A good place to start will be to examine the Entry/Exit Page summary. We'll cover that area a bit later in this report.

An exception to this is an informational site with an excellent user interface. A site like this is easy for someone to find the information they want. If your site is designed to be informational, don't pay as much attention to a low visitor-to-page view ratio.

Another great bit of data in the Summary is the Number of Visits. Again you are looking for a correlation between Unique Visitors and Number of Visits. If the ratio is high, it means that people find your site useful and return to it for updated or additional information.

In general, it is safe to ignore the “Hits” category. For a number of reasons this number is irrelevant.

The conclusions you draw from this data vary depending upon your type of site. A shopping cart site obviously would like to see a high Visit to Return ratio while a business site that contains a lot of company information would like to see a high Visit to Page View ratio.

Monthly History

A historic record of overall activity on your site is the number of Visitors and Page views in a given month compared to other months. This data is provided in the Monthly Summary. Look for spikes of activity that correspond to marketing campaigns throughout the month. Gauge the effectiveness of these campaigns by increases in activity.

Popular Pages / Entry & Exit

Probably the most useful information in this area is the most popular Entry and Exit pages. Your home page will most likely be at the top of the list, and it is usually identified by a forward stroke (/).

If your home page is also the most popular Exit page, there is an obvious problem. You will need to fine tune the design or content of that page in order to persuade people to visit other pages.

If yours is a shopping cart site, you want to make sure that people are not leaving before orders are processed. If they are, perhaps the Popular Pages list will tell you where they become frustrated and give you a chance to repair the flaws.

If you can identify pages that are unexpectedly popular, be sure to add more content that relates to that area.

Referrers

This is another very important report. Want to know how people got to your site? Are you involved in a Pay-Per-Click marketing program? Are there other non-competitive sites that consistently send you a lot of traffic? Are you involved in a banner ad program? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, you should be paying attention to the Referrers listing. The Referrers chart lists the page the visitor was last on just before coming to your site. In other words, it tells you exactly where your visitors came from.

This chart also lists pages requested by the browser once someone is already on your site. That means that very often your own pages will appear in this listing. Simply ignore your own pages and concentrate on the others.

Look at the Direct Request total. That number tells you how many people typed your website address (URL) directly into their browser address window, clicked on a link in an email, or used a bookmark.

Pay particular attention to how many of your visitors come to you via search engines or directories. These numbers tell you which search engines are performing well for you and which need tweaking. Which ones are sending you traffic? The numbers in this section give a pretty good indication on the overall effectiveness of your promotion strategy.

If you see a lot of search engines high on the list, you have done a good job with your page designs, META-tags, and search engine registrations.

If you pay others for links, you should see them towards the top of this list. If they don't appear prominently, you're wasting money.

Top Keyphrases

The Keyphrases list is directly related to the number of search engines that appear in your Referrers list. This list tells you exactly the keywords and keyphrases that people use to find content on your site.

If particular keyphrases are being used often, it is a good indication that you should add additional content related to these areas.

If there are areas on your site that are not getting the traffic you would expect, try to boost their popularity by fine-tuning the page content to be more search engine-friendly. You might want to re-submit your site to the search engines so that they can index the new content.

Related to the keyphrases in the Usage Statistics are the reports generated by your internal search engine. If the keywords that people use once they are on your site are different than the ones used in external search engines, it means that some adjustments need to be made to your page content.

Conclusion

Site Traffic Reports need not be intimidating and should never be ignored. If you know what to look for you'll embrace the possibilities.

The important thing to remember about looking at the reports is to concentrate on what is actionable information – filter out the rest. The categories that we've covered in this report contain the most relevant data for most sites. With proper analysis a simple plan of action to improve your site can be implanted. If you have any questions about interpreting your site usage data give us call and we'll be glad to help.

AUTHOR INFO:
Gregory Chambers is a founding partner at gChambers, Inc., a business-to-business web site development and consulting company. They specialize in building database driven web sites that provide a wealth of marketing data for their clients. For maximum convenience to clients that host their sites with gChambers, Inc., they email a monthly site usage data summary package -- delivered directly to clients’ inboxes. No more hunting for obscure URLs or keeping track of yet another set of logins. It is part of their regular Site Maintenance Package. Contact Gregory Chambers for more information. To contact Gregory directly, call him toll-free at (888) 267-4382 or email him at greg@gChambers.com.