Welcome to my Blog!

 
 
In the recent years, internet websites and resources has transform into something different.

We are see a few types of internet websites that can be grouped into a few categories.

They are :

- Ecommerce
- Informational Content
- Lead generation (Corporate)
- Help and Support sites

Ecommerce

These are basically websites that people do go and buy stuff. Some of the examples includes Amazon.com or a more popular one, to jazzgift.com (which is currently under my ownership and construction).

What this means is a business price of viagra to consumer type of market. As for Ebay.com, it is a consumer to consumer type of commerce, with a proper platform to buy and sell there. These sites often attract online shoppers, and needs a high traffic in order to sustain.

Informational Content

These sites usually contain information like current news, technology updates, information of anything that you want to know more about. It can be a blogging site, like this site or http://singwithpiano.com (offering some singing and piano tips), some organization’s website (http://goodspeedcybercafe.com), or Wiki. By the way, those 2 websites are under my ownership.

There are tons of people sharing information, whether you are a geek or a newbie. These sites often attract a special or specific group of people that needs information. What it means is that people like me who needs help on “how to do wordpress this” or “how to do programming in language X” will tend to like them.

Lead generation (Corporate)

The reason I put a corporate is that nowadays, the corporate site don;t just sit there as a PoC (Point of contact) for clients and customers to get phone numbers or emails. Actual transactions work there. For example, DHL or fedex, where their services are offered online.

The type of website requires a custom design web application, where the business logics are inline with the information systems. Thus they represent a critical function in a business model. These sites attract users who are in the business and consumer market, because apart from giving information, it also provides an offline service.

Help and Support sites

Help and support sites generally meant sites that provide help, and especially help. They are usually sites where a company publishes their help for a product or service, as to lessen the number of service calls required. Some example are microsoft’s support and Yahoo! Answers.

These sites also generate a high traffic rate because it is community driven, meaning people helping each other out, and if you have a similar question, they are more probably answered. Forums can be in this group or under the information/content, depending on what type of information it serves

 
So there you go, a summary of the current sites on the www

Reviewing your traffic sources is one of the most interesting and challenging tasks. When you review, in other words analysis your traffc sources, it tells alot about where your visitors are coming from, be it unique or repeatly visitors.

Any types of web traffic, Small and medium enterprises, MNC businesses, retail shops, will face with these types of sources. Typically, there are 3 types of traffic.

Direct Traffic

User types in your domain name and access your site directly. This means the user already knows your site through some other means, like offline advertising in buses, TV, radio media etc

Search Engine Traffic

User types in a keyword in a search viagra on line prescription engine, search engine shows your site on its page. Another name for this is organic traffic. This is where your keywords are important such that the search engine is able to index it. Both GA and Awstats will track and record the keyword search terms used to gain entrance to your site too.

Referral traffic

User clicks a link on a page that has your domain name on it. This can appear in a simple hypertext link, or a banner ad, or a link in forums or social sites.

Below, I have put in some examples that you’ll see from your Google Analytics. You can gather these web traffic stats from any software that you use to track, but this is more visual viewing and illustrations here.

 
This is my web traffic for www.golfswingplaneblog.com

Onto this web traffic, we see quite a huge traffic coming from search engines. As the traffic is still quite small, and the site is still young, we can’t really say for sure this is the actual web traffic percentage breakdown. Since the nature of this site is of timely updates and videos, it should be expecting more search engine traffics.

We see only 4 direct traffic, which is probably generated by me, and other referral sites, probably from one of the article sites.There can be very deep and detailed analysis about this traffic, and what are the plans to do in 3 months, 6 months, or a year, to improve the traffic percentages.

www.goodspeedcybercafe.com

On this traffic stats, the 3 traffic are split at a bigger pie, with the referrals even bigger. This is due to a lot of “advertising” done on external sites, with links. I expected a bigger direct traffic, because the nature of this site is static and informational, much like a corporate site.

I should be working hard promoting it offline instead, though I recently did an SEO with some appropriate keywords and tags to increase the visibility on the Search engines, so do expect some search engine traffic too.

www.singwithpiano.com

This site is my baby, because it is a closely related to a hobby of mine. Initially I wanted to put my music site together with this blog, but it ended splitting to its own. In the first 3 months, the site has traffic quite evenly squared out. But now since the site has grown with much content and the search engines has indexed it properly, the Search engine traffic increase by a lot.

I would expect the direct traffic to increase, (it has been increasing slowly) and this means more users have remembered my domain name properly, and wants to access my site directly. This site was meant to be both informational, educational, as well as to share my stuff with others.

These are some kind of reviews to some of my sites, and their traffic analysis to show you how important these sources could tell you about.

That’s all for my post on web traffic sources analysis and review!

One of the problems I had to overcome before I used this function, was to login to Google Analytics and then click on my website’s profile.

After awhile I realise that with just a single login, I could view my mail, adsense, analytics, feedburner all at once. That is by using a cool function at the top of Gmail’s page in the Gmail’s > Settings. By clicking on that, a big menu will appear with several pages:

-General
-Accounts
-Labels
-Filters
-Forwarding and POP/IMAP
-Chat
etc…

Just go to the ‘Accounts’ page, and click (open in new tab) on the ‘Google Account settings’. This is my shortcut to Google Analytics!

All thanks to the AJAX scripting, it makes navigating around gmail an enjoyable one, because you don’t need to load the whole page to get to where you want.

And shortly after, I had more and more websites to manage, and they grow exponentially! It was time I stop doing this daily, and instead have Google Analytics mail me the reports. One great tip is that if you use the daily or weekly schedule, It’s gonna show you by default viagra for women the web traffic stats for that day or week. If you login to Analytics directly, you’ll see a collected web stats for the period of 30 days. Well that’s an overall view, though you can change it. I find it troublesome.

Under each individual account, there’s a email function, which you can use to it to mail you web stats.
My strategy is to use the daily report function for sites that have higher traffic (those that are of higher important), and a weekly report for those with lower traffic(those that I am less worried about).

So here’s how you do that email thing:

Click on the email button located near the top left, beside the export.

Then you’ll schedule the frequency of the report to be send to your mail account.

So now, you can sit back and wait for the reports to come to you, instead of you logging in daily to check the web traffic stats generated by Google’s Analytics.

I was showing some of the differences between Awstats and Google Analytics, and so I think it is better to show you their GUI interfaces by taking some screenshots from one of my low hanging sites.

Some of the web analytics stats that are significant will be covered here, so if you think there’s a lot of information provided, don’t panic! Not every detail are important.

My Cpanel Awstats:

My Google Analytics:

A look at these 2 statistics on web traffic analytics shows that there is a big difference between them. On 25 December 2008, which was also Christmas (this is a dated post…), Google analytics show only 391 unique visits with 735 page views for the last 30 days

On the contrast, Cpanel Awstats records a total buy phentermine of 1108 unique visitors and 5653 page views, as of 25th December 2008. Notice there’s a number of visits at 1805, which includes google, yahoo, msn, or other Search engines bots or crawlers. Google Analytics doesn’t have a number of visit stats.

These should be some of the important figures you should look at, before moving onto others. I’ll cover other details that are used to monitor other important stats.

As mentioned in the previous post, a unique visitor is a unique “person” who went to your visit your site. A unique person is considered unique, so long as the computer that he is using is unique too. Here I’ll compare unique visitors vs visit count, as well as awstats in Cpanel and Google analytics.

Let’s go deeper into defining a unique visitor.

If your IP address is static

A unique visitor’s with his PC’s IP address unique, will only register itself on your site’s unique visitor count as 1 hit/day only.

On the first day, if the same guy keeps surfing to your site, closes his browser, and opens your site again, it is considered as 1 hit, no matter how many times he does that. On the visit count, it will appear many times, because that is what the visit counts are registering.

On the second day, if he surfs to your site, he registers 2 unique visitor count on your site. This is because it’s a new day so everything else is reset. buy viagra viagra online With Google analytics, this is considered loyalty, or in other words a returning visitor.

If you are using awstats in Cpanel, you’ll see a big number in unique visitors and number of visits, due to the logging of IP addresses that “touched” the server. But under Google analytics, because it uses Cookies to measure visits, it may not register that second day unique visitor count, as it registers by the cookie information stored on the user’s browser.

If your IP address is dynamic

Most of us here uses dial-up, or dynamic IP adddress. Even if yours is static, it might change once a while say few days to a few months, depending on your ISP.

On the first day, this results in the same as if your are in static IP. Your site registers your visit as 1 count.

On the second day, if your IP changes, it is certain that it registers it as another unique visitor. Basically since most users are on DHCP and if they reboot their machines everyday, you are certainly guaranteed a unique visit.

If you are using awstats in Cpanel, you’ll see an even bigger number count in unique visitors and number of visits. But under Google analytics, because it uses Cookies to measure visits, it will register that second day unique visitor count, but it will be called as a Unique visitor but not New Visits.

Cpanel Awstats vs Google Analytics

When you use 2 different browsers on a single computer, it will result as 2 hits, because the cookies are kept in each separate browser.

Therefore, if you compare the 2 web traffic analytics software, you’ll realise that the number generated by Cpanel Awstats is always greater than that of Google Analytics, in terms of both visits and uniques.

Cpanel Awstats = Logs
Google Analytics = Cookies

By comparing the way both software tracks, they are equally fair in each of them. So I suggest you take the mean of the two, and use that as an “average” unique visitor count.

Happy analyzing !

These are some of the web analysis metrics used to measure a website’s traffic performance. We usually hear about them on news where they report a particular Blockbuster’s view rate. That’s similar to this metrics analytics.

Hits

Hits are geenrated when your browser downloads a file from the website’s server to your computer. Any files that are requested is considered a hit, eg. php, wav (music files), jpg (pictures), PDF, RAR, DOC etc etc…

This metrics is useless, because everytime a page is loaded, you may be receiving up to 5-10 hits. The reason is because a page consists of several files, which the server has to pass it to your browser in order to display it correctly.

Page views

This is a more accurate metric commonly used in web publishing. A page view is considered whenever someone refreshes a page / a piece of content / a text on your web server or web application. This means it counts by page numbers, for an entire page.

This is more accurate than hits, since 1 page view may consists of 5 hits. This figure is especially important on CPM(Cost Per thousand iMpressions) advertising campaigns where they take into consideration how many times an ad is flashed onto someone’s browser.

Visits

A visit is considered a connection session between the computer and the server hosting your site. Because of the way internet browser works, a connected session may last not more than 60 seconds or a cut off value, depending on the configurations. This means that a single computer may be initiate several visits to the site within that few minutes.

This metric is a little tricky, because once the web content is downloaded to your browser, the connection terminates. And if you click a link on the site, it counts as a new visit. But if you session stays alive throughout, it may be considered as one visit. So this gives you a rough guide on how many visits you have served.

Unique Visitors

A unique visitor is the most metric in today’s web traffic analytics. Given the right tools of awstats and google analytics, we can tell the number of unique visitors accurately (or almost accurate). This is important because it tells you how many unique visitors are visiting your site.

It represents an individual visiting viagra buy online your site once, by tracking each individual IP address. Assuming your IP stays static, a visit means a unique visit for the month. This way, it is a clear indicator about how many people actually check out your site, instead of how many times someone refreshes his browser.

Web traffic analytics is all about understanding those people who came to your website.

If you have a website, or wants to know what’s with a website and the web analytics stuff, here’s where you can find some. In this post, I’ll give you an idea on the why, the how, the where, the when and the who.

I’ll just give you some simple explainations:

Why do people visit to your site ?

The reasons are simple. You setup a website with some sort of information or resources, and online viagra purchase then they come to view or use the information and resources. It might also be some sort of search engines “picking” up your web site’s content and keywords too.

Or maybe they love what you offer them, or a “community” that you already have eg. forums, as well as some other free information just about any topic under the sky. A resource might be an E-commerce shopping facility eg. Amazon.com or some help sites like Microsoft’s support site.

How do people visit to your site ?

You see, the why tells you pretty much why they came, but how to you proof the real reasons they came for? To do that you need the How!

Web traffic, people like you and me who surfs the net, usually gets to a website (I like the word ‘resource’) via these 3 methods.

1) Search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN)

2) Referals (a link of your site on someone else’s site)

3) Direct (someone who types in your site’s name on his browser)

So it’s pretty much easy to look at web traffic analysis if we look at how people enter your site.

Where do people visit to your site ?

Firstly, I have to clarify. Theres 2 where. It’s where your traffic came from (which country) and where do they visit.

The country part is pretty straight forward. By looking at your IP address or your ISP’s gateway or proxy, it is easily determined. A range of IP address has been pre-registered by your ISP, managed by ICANN (www.icann.org) which then reveal where that ISP’s country is in. So that’s just that.

The other is where your visitors are looking at. In other words, which are the pages or topics that interest your visitors / which are the higher viewed pages / content.

When do people visit to your site ?

In my oponion, this isn’t very important. Because we all have different time zones, its going to be messy. Also, does it matters if your visitors browse your site in the day or night ? Your website runs 24/7 (your webhost should guarantee that!)

Who visits to your site ?

This is a little tricky, because the who involves a certain level of identification and if you can’t identify them, then this ‘who’ will be out of the question. Typically, if a visitor registers and logs into your site, then it is possible for you to tell who has logged in.

The ‘who’ shouldn’t be of great importance, since it doesn’t matters if it was Bill gates or Obama who visits your site. That is not the aim in Web Traffic analytics!

 
We’ll go into some other areas in web analytics and traffic analysis in the next few posts !