When You Should Use Web Site Traffic Analysis

You can waste a lot of time with web site traffic analysis. However, it can sometimes make the difference between success and failure.

If you followed my advice, you will have chosen a web host that offers AwStats. Don't get tied up looking at the pretty graphs every five minutes.

Signs of Problems

If after your site has been up for two months awstats web analytics tell you that

The search engines haven't visited you yet

You aren't getting any visitors at all to your site

then it is time for you to try to work out the reasons why. It could be because nobody is interested in your theme, or it could be because you are doing something wrong. Web analysis will warn you, and you can start trying to work out what has gone wrong.

On the other hand, if everything is going well, and you look at the keywords that people entered into the search engines to find you, and there are unexpected searches, then you should write web pages for these keywords. For instance, I had a lot of articles about vegetables, and found that dozens of visitors were only interested in beetroot. That was a good reason for me to do more research on beetroot, and write a better article.

Google Analytics

Go to Google search engine and type in your domain name. If it doesn't find anything, it means that Google doesn't know about you yet. Try this simple site analysis with msn and with Yahoo as well. Remember that all the Search Engines are two or three months behind in giving you the statistics. Google is particularly unwilling to give you site analytics because they don't want you to reverse engineer their algorithm.

Is website analysis a waste of time?

No. There are more important things for beginners, but later on you are going to want to start split testing. For instance, the best title for your page may bring in five times as many visitors as the worst title for your site.

So you create four duplicates of a web page, with only the title changed. You'll learn later how to avoid being penalized for duplicate pages by the search engines. You now use website analytics to find the best title of the four, then invent three other titles to compete with the best of the four. You really want about five hundred visitors for analysis of a website split four ways like this.

When you are just starting out, five hundred visitors seem to be somewhere in the vanishingly distant future!

I use some software that disguises my affiliate links to deter thieves, and at the same time makes web site analysis easy. Version one is off the market just now waiting for version 2 to come out, so I'll give more details when it becomes available again. I do all my web site traffic analysis with it.