Introduction
So
you have a web-site - a window of
opportunity for your company at
last ! You have spent good money
on web-site development, still more
money in promoting it and now know
that people do visit your site as
the counter keep on increasing.
But exactly how many NEW visitors
are you getting everyday, how many
visitors come back later, what are
the prime sources of traffic to
your site - search engine ? advertisement
? e-mails ? The bottomline - do
you understand your visitors ?
You may remain oblivious of these
facts, but knowing them will definitely
help you understand the situation
at ground level and take effective
steps to channelise your money and
effort at right direction. The issues
at hand are:
-
How
to quantify traffic
-
Benchmark
your performance
-
Take
corrective measure, if necessary
-
Monitor
performance daily
The first issue is to identify
the standard or widely accepted
performance parameters. The
basic parameters are:
Hits
A
"hit" is a request for a file
to the server. Let's say, for
example, that you have a page
that has five graphics on it.
This means, this page is made
up of 6 files - one plain text
ascii file containing the html
code for the page and 5 additional
graphics files in .gif, .jpg
or any other file format. If
your site has audio or video
clippings, that again adds to
number of files.
When a visitor asks for this
page, the server receives six
requests or six 'Hits'.
Hit obviously can not be a real
indicator of traffic or site
performance as it creates an
inflated report of site traffic.
If I could report hits alone,
I could create graphics-filled
pages and report numbers into
the tens of millions.
Page
View or Impression
This
is a listing of how many times the
page (with all associated files)
has been seen by a visitor. A visitor
may visit a page three times in
the course of surfing the site and
it will be reported as 3 page views.
However, reloads are generally excluded
from page views. Taking our above
example, traffic statistics for
this visitor is - 3 page views and
18 hits.
Unique
or Visitor
Unique,
as the name implies, is the number
of individual people coming into
the site in a day. A visitor once
logs into your site will be regarded
as one unique, no matter how many
pages he visits or how many times
he comes back within the same day.
For our above example, the traffic
statistics of the visitor is - one
unique, 3 page views and 18 hits.
Performance
Parameters for Benchmarking
You
can do a variety of analysis using
above and a few other parameters.
For example, uniques and page views
per month, most visited pages, path
taken by visitors within your site,
time spent, repeat visits, entry
page, exit page, depth of page views
per visitor etc. These analyses
and benchmarking will reveal if
your server is fast enough, whether
your navigation scheme needs a fresh
look or contents need more updates
!
How
to collect these statistics ?
If
you have your own site (your domain
name), your server administrator
will provide a logfile containing
basic traffic data. With a special
software you can analyse the logfile
and create traffic statistics.
Members of The Great Indian Bazaar
can view over 200 different statistics
about their web-site traffic. Each
web-site at our server gets a feature
reach control panel for administering
the site. The Control Panel contains
popular website traffic statistics
generators like Webalizer, Analog,
AWStats etc.
The other option is to go for a
third party monitoring. There are
few companies that provide excellent
data and statistical analysis of
your web-site traffic in real time.
However, it may mean giving out
your traffic statistics to outsiders
- which may not be advisable for
some applications
