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 |
