Website Traffic Optimization

There is a wealth of data available at website owners’ fingertips today, which is great for analyzing website performance and for making educated decisions about future web marketing efforts. Free web analytics programs like Google Analytics allow deep insight into user behavior on your website. By analyzing the data that you collect over time on site visits, visits from search engines, pages per visit, time on site, and many other data points, you can make intelligent decisions about how to increase and improve your site traffic – also called website traffic optimization.

Getting Meaning from Web Traffic Trends

The website traffic trends of interest to online business owners have to do with customer behaviors (visiting, staying and buying), how much organic (natural) traffic is finding its way to your site and how much paid traffic is coming your way and if it results in conversions. By figuring out your website goals and conversion points at the beginning, you will be able to figure ROI quite easily for any online marketing costs you incur.

An e-commerce site is a virtual storefront. Examining customer behavior on your site is like examining customer behavior in a store. What are they looking for? Are they able to easily find it? Are they comparison shopping? You can find all of this data in your web analytics program.

Some of your traffic figures might look quite good, in that visitors are going from page to page and back again, like shoppers browsing a store. Are they lost and confused and giving up in frustration, or do they eventually make their way to the checkout area? If a significant percentage exit at the home page, you might have a problem with that page.

You can also check the timing of visits. If your audience includes working professionals, are they visiting during work hours or before and after work? This information can guide what type of customer service you offer. If you can’t have a 24/7 help line, you might set up autoresponders to make sure no e-mail goes unanswered in the evening and during the night. If your traffic bulges around 3 p.m. every weekday, you may hypothesize that many of your visitors are kids and/or teenagers who are just getting home from school.

Timing information can also give you a clue about visitors from other time zones and countries. Again, if you’re getting interest from afar, you might design customer service, language options and shipping options accordingly. Looking at the data on popular pages will help you identify popular products. Product pages that have a low number of visitors may be problematic: either you have to take action to give them some life or consider dropping the items from your product line.

Paid Website Traffic Analysis

You’ve invested time and money in search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads or banner, affiliate and associate programs, newsletters, e-mail campaigns and memberships in newsgroups or forums. Luckily, you can check your traffic figures to see which of your efforts has brought you the most traffic, since the data can be set up to differentiate the origin of a visitor from:

• a specific search engine
• a specific site with URL
• a specific e-mail
• newsgroups, forums, blogs and other public services
• the exact keywords that were used in a search engine to locate a particular page.

Since the data can also reveal the path taken through your site, you can reverse the path and find out exactly where each paying customer found out about you.

Make Decisions By Looking At Trends Over Time

All of this data can seem overwhelming, so it is best to look at trends over time before making any major strategy adjustments. Testing your site’s usability and looking at your analytics data regularly will give you a good idea of what steps to take to improve your users’ experience and optimize your website traffic.