Boosting Your Site Traffic

If your shopping cart is scaring off sales, you might never know – unless you track what works and what doesn’t. Gary Marshall discovers how metrics can shed light on your site

She’s spotted a must-have product on your pages, and the credit card is poised. She clicks on the checkout button… and discovers that you want her entire life story before you’ll sell anything to her. “Sod that,” she says. “I’m off to take a look on Amazon”. Another customer lost.

When you run a web site, knowledge isn’t power: it’s money. Spotting problems at an early stage can stop visitors being scared off, while knowing who your visitors are, where they come from and what they’re doing can help boost your search engine rankings, improve the performance of adverts and alert you to possible problems such as bandwidth leeching and other unpleasant online activities. Best of all, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get that information – and in many cases, everything you need is free.

Going metric

Analysing site traffic is known as ‘metrics’, and there’s a huge range of metrics packages to choose from. The simplest form of metrics is a basic hit counter, which tells you how many times a page has been viewed. However, if you want information you can actually use then you’ll need something a bit more powerful.

Many hosting firms include metrics as part of their package, so for example if you host your site with 1&1 (www.oneandone.co.uk) you can see a range of statistics including the most popular pages, the browsers your visitors use and where in the world they come from. Even if your host doesn’t provide such packages it’s easy to get the same features online: Site Meter (www.sitemeter.com) and eXTReMe Tracking (www.extremetracking.com) both provide free stats packages that can provide an insight into what your visitors have been up to. In both cases you simply sign up for a free account and paste a bit of code into the HTML of the pages you want to track.

Both services are useful, but there are some limits to what the free accounts actually do. In the case of Site Meter you need to put a logo or counter on your page, which means anyone can click on it and see the stats; you’re also limited to viewing details of the last 100 visitors, which means the free account isn’t suitable for busier sites. It doesn’t track the search terms people use, either, so it won’t help you optimise your pages for better search engine performance, and you can’t see what sites referred people to your pages.

eXTReMe Tracking is more generous. It shows the search engines and search terms people are using to find your site, and it also provides information about your visitors’ locations. With both services you can pay a little extra for more detailed statistics, so for example if you spend $6.25 (about £4) per month with eXTReMe you get additional information such as detailed visitor analysis, which enables you to see how individual visitors arrived at your site, how long they spent there and what pages they looked at.

Before spending money on such services, though, it’s a good idea to look at some of the free options. In many cases you can get everything you need without paying a penny.

Help from your host

We’ve already mentioned that 1&1 provides a metrics package as part of its hosting plans, and you’ll find that rival firms such as Fasthosts do, too. While the specific packages differ from host to host, the products they use tend to cover the same basic information: where your visitors come from, which pages they’ve been looking at, what sites sent them to you and which bits of your site are the most popular. You can also see where they come from, although this data is rather simple: typically you’ll be able to see your visitors’ ISPs, but not the particular location they’re connecting from. For detailed geographical information you’ll need a more powerful analytics program such as a package from WebTrends, NedStat or Google. However, there’s another way to get data from your host: download the server logs and analyse them yourself.

Your web server keeps a log of traffic to and from your site, and you can download the log file to your computer to analyse it yourself. Two of the most popular log file analysers are Analog (www.analog.cx) and Webalizer (www.mrunix.net/webalizer), both of which are free (Webalizer is open source) and run on all the major operating systems. Once you’ve installed the software it’s just a matter of pointing it at the log you want to analyse and waiting a few seconds for the program to generate an HTML report that you can view in your browser. In both cases you can then see which URLs are referring people to your pages and what terms your visitors are using in search engines; if you use Webalizer, you can also see which pages are proving most popular, which pages your visitors tend to arrive at and which pages result in the most exits from your site. Exit data is particularly useful for ecommerce sites: if one of the top exit pages is a key component of your checkout system, it suggests that something is scaring people off between placing an item in the shopping basket and actually paying for it.

Advanced analysis

Being able to see where your visitors come from and what they do is useful for any site, but when your site is your business then you need to know even more. Typically, large sites need to monitor the performance of advertising, special offers or promotions, and to identify problems such as registration forms that scare off potential customers.

For large sites, firms such as WebTrends (www.webtrends.com) and NedStat (www.nedstat.co.uk) can track almost anything. WebTrends describes a few scenarios: “The business analyst… knows that customers who visit the site three to five times are twice as likely to buy as those who have visited once, and the customers who have visited more than ten times in the last week aren’t likely to buy at all – they’re almost always just looking.” Meanwhile the email marketer knows that 95 per cent of list recipients have yet to buy, the online marketer can see that the most popular paid keyword campaigns include phrases such as ‘cruises from Miami’ and the site designer can see that ‘a large number of people are leaving the conversion process on the page where they select airfare’.

Dedicated metrics suites are overkill for modest sites and could prove expensive. Prices start at a few hundred pounds, but metrics packages are typically priced according to traffic volumes – so the busier your site, the more expensive the metrics become. However, medium-sized sites can get similar functionality for free – if you can get an invite.

If your site serves up fewer than five million page views per month (or if you have an AdWords account) then you can get Google Analytics (analytics.google.com) for free. However, as with many Google services the Analytics service is only available to a select few, with invitations to join handed out on a first-come, first-served basis. As you’ll see from our tutorial below, Getting Started With Google Analytics, it’s worth the wait: with a bit of tweaking you can use it not just to track your traffic, but to monitor any clickable content. You can even set filters to exclude clicks from particular IP addresses (such as your office network) or to turn dynamic URLs into something more readable. There’s only one potential problem: the service relies on a short piece of JavaScript code, so you won’t be able to track users who browse with JavaScript disabled.

One of Google Analytics’ most powerful features is its Goal Analysis. A goal is a page you want visitors to end up at, such as your ‘thanks for downloading’ page or your ‘thanks for subscribing’ page. You can define up to four pages as goals in Google Analytics, and you can also define ‘funnel’ pages, which are the pages leading up to a goal. For example, to get to the ‘thanks for downloading page’ visitors might first visit the list of downloads, then the download instructions page. By defining the goal and the funnel process you can see whether any visitors are leaving midway through the process, which can highlight potential problems with particular pages. You can also see conversion rates for each goal, so for example, you’ll be able to see what percentage of visitors end up downloading your file or subscribing to your newsletter.

Whether you’re monitoring a few hundred visitors or hundreds of thousands, site metrics enable you to see what works on your site, what doesn’t, and where you should be concentrating your energies – whether that’s improving your search engine rankings, spotting problem pages, making your site stickier or just ensuring that you don’t exceed your hosting firm’s monthly data transfer limit. Every single visitor to your site is trying to tell you something, and metrics can make sure you receive their message loud and clear.