We often hear people asking “how do I really use website traffic reports to improve my site/blog? “When someone creates a site, he will automatically be using some kind of reporting tool. The most common is of course Google analytics. It is the site tool that is default with any blogs one will be creating with the use of the BlogSpot platform. Also it is free and reliable since the data that feeds it comes from the search engine that is the king of them all – Google (the name should have at least given that idea by now).
Traffic reports are as important to a websites success as traffic itself. There is no way of attaining or maintaining any amount of success driving traffic without knowing the stats that surrounds it. Just ask the owners of successful websites how much they relied on website traffic report tools to get where they are at the moment. In fact, it will not be surprising if those website owners tell you that they do not simply rely on just one tool along for all the data they harvest for their site. The usual practice is to be familiar at using two or three. And they use these tool a lot! Managing, posting content and improving a website will always assure that you’ve got another tab pen for a reporting tool, unless of course you’re a complete newbie and you don’t know how to interpret its results.
Let’s run down of the 3 things that one will more often encounter on the most used websites tools which reports website traffic data.
Pageviews
Pageview’s usage is what it name actually implies. It tells us the number of visitors that have arrived in our site on a finite set of time. The numbers are often categorized in the duration of how long it has taken for that number of visitors to get there. The interface varies on the different website traffic report tools we are accustomed on using but usually when you get to pageviews you will be greeted by a graph. The graph is a line drawing a bunch of spikes which basically represents visually the activities in your site against time.
Traffic sources
Together with the pageviews functionality, “traffic sources” completes the dashboard which would be the first set of tool to greet a web developer when he wants to check the health of his site. On this functionality one would see the breakdown of where your visitors have originated. It offers a quick glimpse of what links or methods your visitors have used to arrive to your site. This enables you to make decision on which website traffic driving strategies should you pursue and which ones to drop.
Posts or Pages
These section or functionality reports an in depth look on where your visitors are spending much of their time on your website. This gives you a bird’s eye view on which pages are doing well and how you can gather as much of the right things going for it.
