ANALYZE

Introduction to Traffic Analysis

There are various ways you can track and monitor the traffic coming to your Web site. With some of the methods, you can determine:

• How much traffic you received and from what search engine
• What keywords people use to find you
• How users behave after they land on your website
• How many of them actually end up as customers.

You should use traffic analysis to track and monitor trends over time. This will inform you if what you are doing today is better or worse than what you did yesterday. Traffic analysis can also be used to monitor real-time statistics to tune live ad campaigns.

Traffic analysis has three distinct elements:

1. Data collection - Collecting the visitor data that you want to use as a basis for mining and reporting.
   
   
2. Data mining/analysis - Filtering (otherwise known as data mining) the data - and extracting the information you need for calculations and reporting.
   
   
3. Reporting results - Creating graphical reports of the data you have collected and filtered. This can be done in real-time, close to real-time reports through a Web-browser, or printed reports in Word or PDF format.

Sometimes traffic analysis packages come bundled with two or all three elements included. Trackers and network sniffing products usually include all three parts, and server log analysis tools have the last two elements.

TIP:
You will find a good and more in-dept tutorial about traffic analysis at DigitalEnterprise.org

In this section we will give you a very brief introduction to each of the main ways you can monitor and analyze the traffic on your website and the results of your search engine optimization.

• SEM Action Checklist - Analyze
  
  
• Pros and Cons of Traffic Counters (otherwise known as hit counters)
  
  
• Pros and Cons of Server Monitor Log Analysis
  
  
• Pros and Cons of Network Package Sniffing
  
  
• Introduction to Ranking Analysis