Analyzing Site Traffic
By Cynthia Arko

How do you gauge the success of your site? Well, a brick-and-mortar business would count cash at the end of the day. Aside from running to your mailbox to collect commission checks, analyzing site traffic can help achieve your goal of boosting affiliate sales and commissions. You'll need to understand how your site helps or hinders affiliate sales by assessing the number of visitors, where they are coming from and what pages they are visiting. Understanding this data can help you adjust content to better suit your visitors interests and boost affiliate sales.

Ongoing measurement of your site's performance is essential to maximizing the success that you've worked so hard to achieve. Most hosting companies provide access to a stats area where data is presented in easy to read graphs and charts.

The General Statistics page for WebTrends shows the date and time the report was generated along with:
Average Hits Per Day — Number of successful hits divided by the total number of days in the log file.
Average Page Views Per Day — Number of page views (impressions) divided by the total number of days in the log file.
Average Visit Length — During the reporting period, the average length of all visits that viewed at least one file considered a page.
Average Visits Per Day — Number of visits divided by the total number of days in the log file.
Document Views — Number of hits to pages that are considered documents — not forms — as defined by the system administrator.
Hits — A hit refers to a single action on the Web server as it appears in the log file. A visitor downloading a single file is logged as a single hit, while a visitor requesting a Web page including two images registers as three hits on the server; one hit is the request for the HTML page, and the two additional hits are requests for the downloaded image files. While the volume of hits is an indicator of Web server traffic, it is not an accurate reflection of the number of pages being viewed.
Home Page Hits — Number of times the home page (as defined in the profile) was visited.
International Visits — Percentage of visitors who are defined as "international visitors" by the system administrator.
Page — Any document, dynamic page, or form. Documents are defined by the system administrator, but generally include all static content, such as complete HTML pages. Dynamic pages are created with variables and do not exist anywhere in a static form. Forms are scripted pages, which get information from a visitor that gets passed back to the server.
Page View (Impressions) — A page view is a hit to any file that is classified as a Page. Contrast with Hit, which counts files of every type.
Successful Hits For Entire Site — Number of successful hits including HTML pages, images, forms, scripts, and downloaded files.
Unique Visitors — Number of unique visitors determined by IP addresses, domain names, and cookies.
Visits — Number of visits to your site. If a visitor is idle longer than the idle-time limit, WebTrends assumes the visit ended. If the visitor continues to browse your site after they reach the idle-time limit, a new visit is counted. The default idle-time limit is thirty minutes. The time limit can be changed by the system administrator.
Visits from the United States — Percentage of visits from the United States.
Visits of Unknown Origin — Percentage of visits from an unknown origin.
Visitors Who Visited More Than Once — Number of visitors who visited the site more than once during the reporting period.
Visitors Who Visited Once — Number of visitors who visited the site exactly once during the reporting period.

Traffic allows you to measure how often your site is accessed. One of the most important measurements for gauging site popularity is the number of visitors. This number gives you an approximation of the amount of people that have viewed or visited your site.

Featuring affiliate specials and promotions may draw more visitors and result in a spike in traffic. To maintain a steady flow of traffic, be sure to develop an affiliate strategy that includes fresh content and special promotions.

Popular pages
Knowing how many visitors you have are useful; but a better measurement of your site's performance is a breakdown of what internal pages and files are being accessed. Analyzing these popular pages allows you to maintain a tighter focus and stay in tune with your visitor's interests. Removing pages that rank very low, can free up time to concentrate on promoting commission generating high-ranking pages. You may also be surprised at how well a complimentary page or offer may perform. A Proflowers.com banner may perform very well on a golf site because the site's target audience is primarily men — and we all know men just love to buy flowers for women (at least that's how it should work :)).

Where are they coming from?
Knowing how people are getting to your site can help determine how well your promotional strategy is working. We know how important search engine listings can be; but how do you know if they are working? You would be surprised that most of your visitors may come from one search engine. Take a close look at your meta tags and keywords to help identify why this particular search engine has listed your site.

Your golf site just may get picked up in a sports directory or golf portal. Knowing where your traffic is coming from provides some great ideas on other sites to contact. Use your stats to identify promotional opportunities and closer partnerships.

Get moving
Don't just sit back and expect affiliate checks to appear in your lap. Contact your hosting company to see what stats are available to you and start to become familiar with them. If stats are not available through your hosting company, here are a few good mid-range Web traffic analysis solutions you may want to evaluate.

WebTrends offers an affordable detailed analysis of log files and some great reports. Scalable for any size business. Free downloadable trial versions are available.
NetStats Live provides close to real-time Web page hit demographics, counters and referrer information in several formats. Pricing starts at $5/month for up to 10,000 page hits and $1 per additional 10,000 hits.
HitBox offers a free service if you don't mind featuring a HitBox advertisement. Provides traffic, referrers, user paths and profiles. Mid-range and high-end paid versions are available starting at $23.95/month.
WebStat provides a somewhat limited free 30-day demo and full registered version. Basic registered version is $5/month.

Even if you don't have your own domain name (and you should), basic site statistics are available by using an invisible counter on your page such as TheCounter.com's free service. Insert code for the counter on your home page and check your stats on TheCounter's site. TheCounter reports when the visits occur, the referring URL, and what browser your visitors are using. Very basic but you can't beat the price!

Website Traffic Report also offers a FREE complete tracking and reporting system to analyze your Web site traffic and evaluate the performance of your marketing programs. Have fun getting to know your Web site stats!

Cynthia A. Arko is the Product Director for internet.com's Refer-it.com (Refer-it.com) affiliate directory. She coordinates advertising, site development, and conference planning. Cynthia helped grow Refer-it.com from a small directory of Affiliate Programs to the Web's leading resource for information about affiliate programs. She also currently maintains KidsTown Direct, a shopping portal for parents and young families. Cynthia can be reached at carko@internet.com.