Will Analyzing Web Traffic Cost You In The Long Run?

Analyzing web 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 in analyzing web 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 web 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 way of analyzing web traffic 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.

By analyzing web traffic the smart way, 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.