Know Your Traffic And Make The Best Of It
- Do you know what pages are the most popular on your site?
- Do you know what keyword(s) bring you the most search engine traffic?
- Do you know what IP’s hit your site most often?
- Do you know how many visitors are at your site at any given moment?
I do.. and a whole lot more – and this is probably one of those secrets to my success that so many people ask me about. Since day-one, I have always obsessed on my traffic. Where it was from, who it was, how/why they came, how long they stayed, what they did, etc – to this day, I still spend more time looking at and sifting through traffic stats than anything else.
In the early days I looked through my raw-logs and mostly paid attention only to the referral strings. When raw logs got too tedious to fish through, I moved up to using the information that the Drupal Statistics Module provides. The Drupal stats module is actually much easier to use than raw logs, and provides real-time info like top referrers, top visitors by IP, hits/referrers by page, and more. Not long after that, I also started using Google Analytics which really lets me drill-down through my visitor data, but it also has a ~3 hour delay before I can see the information that it collects.
What I Do With All That Data
As with most things, I keep it pretty simple.
The metric I watch the most is what pages are moving up in the SERPS and starting to bring in traffic. If I see that a particular page is beginning to rank well for a term I may “optimize” that page a bit by adding a bit more text with the high-ranking keywords in it, changing the keywords in the page to bold, or modifying the title to include the keywords, etc. If the page starts to bring in a lot of traffic I might throw in an additional Adsense unit (with a channel so I can track it) or I might put an afilliate link on the page if appropriate. I may also add more pages with similar content and keywords.
When I first started the website, and noticed traffic trickling in from a few specific keywords I did these things (above), particularly adding more related content – doing this made my traffic jump from a few hundred visitors per day to over 4,000/day in just a few weeks. This was a huge accomplishment and the funny thing is that the keywords and content that we started to focus on (and get traffic for) had nothing to do with what we had in mind when we first created the website – but “following the traffic“ has helped to get us where we are today.
Another metric I like to watch is referrals (who’s sending me traffic). I can easily view referrals in either the Drupal stats or Analytics, but I prefer Drupal’s ‘Top Referrers’ becuase it’s fast, simple, and always current (no delays). There isn’t a lot I can do with this info, but it lets me know who’s linking to the site which tells me what other people find interesting or helpful. I also use the Drupal stats to watch what IP’s are hitting the site most often. This lets me see what members are the most active and also tips me off to scrapers that might need to be blocked from the site (they are the anyonmous IP’s that have 10x more page-views than anyone else, and tend to originate from other countries).
I also dive into Analytics to see things like browser type, country of origin, time of day/day of week trends and about a million other things, but none of these are as helpful to me as just knowing why people are coming to the site – and building on and capitalizing on what is already working.
Do YOU know what your most popular content is and more important – are you capitalizing on it?
Randy, thanks for this post. So many tips to chew in. I will try this.
impressive picture
never think to use similar content before, thanks for the tips.
I’ve been using (free) statcounter since day one, and very happy with it.
I do however need to inspect and capitalize a wee bit more though; I’ll admit that.
I monitor my cpanel and analytics stats pretty closely so i do know what pages are most popular, but i had never thought of changing that particular post to accomodate more keywords. I might give it a go in the future. Thanks for the tip.
Is Drupal Statistics Module for drupal only or for Wordpress too? I’ll try on my WP blog. Can I?
Thanks
Pramudita said:
The Drupal Stats module only works on Drupal.. THere is a plugin available for Wordpress, that although not as good as the Drupal Stats Module, is pretty good. You can get it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
I love going over my website statistics and that is part of my problem, analysis paralysis. I spend too much time learning about my visitors and not enough putting that information to use by creating more high quality content. I have found that learning about your visitors is only useful if you take practical steps take advantage of the information.
One of the things I have did when I was starting out was to daily review all the keywords visitors used to find my website. I used that information to get ideas for new content pages. That is how I came with the ideas for some of my most profitable pages.
Great tip – to observe which sites are starting to pull traffic and then enhance them.
You can easily get caught up messing around with sites that haven’t started to show their form yet and so you might not see results from your actions.
Very cool tips. I have one post that gets a lot of search engine traffic. I will do this tonight. Thanks Greg Ellison