Understanding Site Traffic

Whether or not you regularly check traffic to your web site, a wealth of data is being gathered and stored in files that you can download and examine whenever you wish. You can also generate your own data or contract with a web traffic analyst to do it for you. Specialists who analyze web traffic data are in a specialized field called web analytics.

Servers have always recorded traffic information in structures called log files. In particular, they store two metrics called page views and visits. Many people try to use these measures to analyze their traffic, but they're not as useful as they once were.

Search engine spiders and server proxies have made it difficult to come to grips with a much more important set of metrics called unique visitors. In many cases, a visitor to your site can leave and re-enter many times, so the data might appear to be telling you that you have thousands of visitors when in fact you have only a few.

Conversely, because servers get their information from the IP addresses from which visitors originate, the web proxies that are in common use to provide security for many corporate networks channel many users through a single IP address. This means that your logfiles might show fewer unique visitors than you actually have.

This is not to say that all the data are useless, but you can't perform a good analysis of your data unless you understand these limitations.

Page Tagging To the Rescue
By the mid-1990s, web site developers were ready for more accurate data about the traffic to their sites. Web counters were invented to track the number of visitors to specific pages. You probably saw counters on web pages as you browsed, but now they're mostly invisible.

Page tagging doesn't just count the number of times a particular page is downloaded. It can also record information such as the amount of money spent on an e-commerce site. Page tagging services also manage cookies. While cookies have been the subject of controversy in the last few years, they're not the electronic spies that many people think they are. Nevertheless, shopping carts designed to work with cookies are useless unless your potential customer is willing to turn the cookie blocker off.

Page Tagging Advantages and Disadvantages