Web Traffic - Management

Traffic is a general term for website visitors. Although your web pages may be delivered by many human and software based visitors, traffic is generally understood to mean human visitors. Your marketing activity should incorporate an Internet Marketing Strategy, which should in turn have effect on your website traffic i.e. the number of visitors, the type of visitor (target market), where the visitor has come from (how they are referred to your web pages), what key phrases visitors used to be referred from the search engines to your web pages (and which web pages they landed on first), what your conversion rate is, what factors can have an affect on that conversion rate etc. To fully understand the behaviour of your website traffic the management function has to be applied to your website(s) and Internet Marketing generally.

Measurement of traffic data, conversion of data to useful information, understanding of the information, and the ability to take management decisions accordingly are vitally important in making the most of your website traffic. These come under the broad term of Web Analytics, online and / or offline.

Statistics Packages, Web Analytics and Their Importance to Managing Your Traffic

There are large number of different packages designed to record and analyse date, and present it in the form of useful information about your website. Originally these were known a statistics packages, and as over time they developed into progams which could analyse and present information in a form that was easier to understand and use, they became known more as website analytics packages. Some are bundled with or are standard with specific web packages / web hosting deals, and some are free or paid-for add-ons. These packages are known as ‘on-site Web Analytics’ because they are a web based way of analysing your website activity.

Google Analytics for is a popular, free analytics package which not only provides detailed and important information about your web pages, but this package comes from and therefore has a string relationship with the main referrer of search engine visitors to most websites i.e. the Google search engine.

Some aspects of traffic and traffic behaviour are more important than others to measure and understand. These are popularly called the website ‘Key Performance Indicators’ (KPIs), and these KPIs will be strongly linked to and guided by the organisations own KPIs. The organisation’s KPIs in most cases are ultimately going to be ruled by the financial KPIs. There should therefore be a way of measuring and reconciling the KPIs of your website with the KPIs of the organisation / company. In the business world, websites could therefore be looked at as tools which generate enquiries, leads and sales. In order to do this however the right amount of the right kind of traffic must be driven to the website, and website analytics should be used to understand and better manage what happens to that website traffic in the future.

It is no longer enough to know simply how many visitors have been to your web pages. Each organisation’s goals and objectives will govern the precise KPIs for the organisation as a whole, and the website(s). Some general information about traffic and its behaviour on the website which is of importance to many organisations often includes:

• The number of new and unique visitors, and how these relate to measurable promotional activity.
• The main entry page, most popular page, and the main exit pages / main places and points where visitors are lost or abandon crucial conversion processes.
• The amount of website visitors which measurably convert via the website.
• The keywords and key phrases which visitors are referred to your pages by using those keywords / key phrases in the search engines, and how this information feeds back into your SEO strategy.
• How the Pay Per Click campaigns (if there are any) are progressing and being managed, and how information relating to these is fed back into the PPC strategy and the development of landing pages in terms of their SEO and conversion.

In order to effectively manage website traffic it is therefore important to have a measureable, manageable system in place which reconciles the KPIs of the organisation with the measurement and effective use of individual website KPIs.