Website Statistics - Finding Your Peak

April 09, 2006

The goal of every online marketer is to increase website traffic, which means that you are in essence creating more exposure. The more exposure and traffic, the more page views, hits, visits, etc. you will accumulate.

One of the functions involved with online marketing is website statistics analysis. This is key to determining how successful different marketing campaigns and optimization techniques are performing. Without a measure of success, you may as well haphazardly try different approaches to increasing exposure. However, by analyzing your stats you can wisely consider which is the next most logical step in trying to increase your website traffic.

Let's say you start off with a brand new website. Any online marketer worth their weight in salt should be able to initiate a pretty good online marketing strategy. This includes the obvious approaches such as good on-page optimization, reaching out to directories and other sites of similar taste, planning on developing a press release strategy, and perhaps employing pay-for advertising such as pay-per-click campaigns or taking out ads on other websites. In addition you might employ email blast campaigns, include RSS feeds, and find ways to constantly update the site to ensure fresh content is always available to be indexed by the search engines.

Traffic WILL increase. Page views WILL go up. The website's footprint in the search engines WILL grow larger. There will come a time however when traffic starts to level off. I've noticed this in every single one of the sites I manage. Each site is obviously geared towards a different audience and niche market which will play a role in how much total traffic the site might be able to generate. There is also a time issue...I can only afford and manage to put so much time and effort into each site. That being said, it is obvious when a peak is reached and the stats start to level off.

Paying attention to these peaks is paramount in determining how to increase traffic even further. If the times when you see an increase in traffic are due to experimenting with news ways to increase exposure, then the times when traffic peaks should be devoted to planning future "experiments".

When a peak in web stats is reached and traffic starts to level off, it is now time to deeply analyze those stats packages. Which pages are generating the most traffic? Which keywords are referring the most visitors? Which pages do visitors seem to leave the site the most often? Which days of the week are generating the most page views? When your website statistics reach a peak, don't panic. Instead analyze your stats and use the findings to prepare future campaigns to once again start a new increase in traffic to reach the next peak.

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