Analyzing Your Traffic

OK, so you have your website up and running, you're getting orders (hopefully) or customer inquiries, and you figure everything is finished. Or is it? Sure, your email inbox may be filling up with requests, but where are they coming from? Are your customers finding you through Google, or one of the other search engines? Have other sites linked to yours, and provided you with additional traffic? Where do users normally enter your site (they may have bookmarked a page other than your home page)? What page are they on when they leave it? Which pages are more popular than the rest, or are rarely if ever visited?

These, and other questions, must be answered if you're going to keep your website useful and effective in growing your business or satisfying your customers. The only way to do that is to have the ability to analyze the server statistics regularly to get the answers you need, and then act on those answers by updating or rearranging your content to match what the users are telling you they need, albeit subtly, in their navigation through your site. If your hosting service does not provide access to the server logs, or you're not running them through an analysis program, then you're ignoring valuable information about the effectiveness of your Internet presence.

PCV Software can explain the benefits of website traffic analysis, and help you to implement a regular program of data gathering and reduction. We've placed an example of such analysis on our site (the client name and all page references have been masked).