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Analyzing your
websites traffic is an important
thing to know, whether you are an
affiliate marketer, owner of a
business website, or even a personal
blogger. Anticipating traffic is key
to picking a suitable web hosting
company and hosting package. You
never want your website to be down
due to excess bandwidth usage or a
sudden burst in traffic, and this is
especially so when in affiliate
marketing or business. Needless to
say, analyzing web traffic to your
domain is something that every
serious website owner needs to get
done.
This article will outline a few
different methods to analyze your
website's traffic.
Everyone is familiar with the flashy
javascript visitor counter that
appears on many a poorly designed
website. While having a visible
counter on your homepage or index
page can be a huge source of
embarrassment or ridicule, there are
ways of placing a visitor counter in
such a way that only you can see it.
Nevertheless, this method only
records the number of hits to your
website, and is obviously a poor
method of analyzing visitor traffic.
Another method is to use your ISP's
statistical package. Most business
friendly ISPs provide this service
free of charge, although some will
try to bill you for it. There are a
few statistical packages available
online such as Analog, Getstats and
wwwstats. Using these softwares you
can get a greater and deeper
understanding of your website
traffic beyond what a mere counter
can achieve. Some data of interest
would be the number of distinct
hosts and the total data
transferred. The number of distinct
hosts roughly correlates to the
number of different people who
visited your website over the time
period. While it does not tell you
what they do, it is a better way of
counting visitors compared to
counters which log requests instead.
Total data transferred can have
implications for your web hosting
package or ISP costs, and is
important that you take note of this
as well.
A more in-depth analysis can usually
be obtained by using web traffic
analysis software, which sometimes
come with your web hosting company
or publishing platform. You can find
out where your visitors come from,
how they discover your website,
which pages are the most popular,
which search engines are the best
for your website, which banner ads
are showing the greatest income,
which web browsers to optimize your
web pages for and even find out
where bad links or errors are
occurring in your website.
Through the smart use of web traffic
analysis, you can find out pertinent
data which can help you fine tune
your website and web marketing
strategy. Without doing analysis,
your website is hindered from
achieving its full potential, akin
to driving blindfolded. Web traffic
analysis is the compass to the ship
that is your website. Let web
traffic analysis show you the
direction your website should take
and what you should do to improve
your business, affiliate marketing
website, or blog..
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