Exploring Traffic Statistics
Zooming in on Traffic Statistics
How many times did I turn left, how many times did I turn right and how many times did I stop? On my long drive to work and home every day I asked myself this question one day. In my car it’s difficult to count every day but on your website the turns and stops people visiting take dramatically affect how successful your website is. There are many different ways to obtain important traffic statistics about your website that go far beyond tracking your web pages with statistical research and analysis software.
Compare Your Traffic Statistics
Maybe you have the need (desire) to find out how your website stacks up against the competition. One of my favorite tools to do this is compete.com . This is one of many tools for online marketing research that requires qualitative market research. All you need to do is enter your website URL along with two other competitors then click the submit button to see how you fair against the competition. In the example below I am using Facebook.com, Google.com, and Yahoo.com. You can quickly see where all the growth has been over the last year by observing the Facebook.com trend line. This is a great way to compare your website against known competitors.

Source (Click to reveal stats)
Learn Trends in Marketplaces
Using another powerful online tools that Google provides it’s pretty easy to gain a better understanding of keyword markets and traffic stats. In the example below I have used the keyword “Google Analytics”. In a matter of seconds we can not only see that this keyword has grown significantly since 2005, we can also see significant news events.

Google Analytics Traffic Sources
Now if you want to take a look at the website traffic statistics visiting your website the tool of choice in my opinion is Google Analytics. This is because it is enterprise class analytics software and the price is right; free. The report interface provides a visual rich comprehensive view of traffic statistic data from all different channels you have configured to be tracked.

Google Analytics Training Video Series
Explore the goal conversion tab after you have configured conversion tracking. Add a sexy landing page to your pay per click campaigns and compare site statistics before and after.

You can also use special filters and regular expressions to further enhance your traffic reporting . Track a subscription website or direct mail order buyers with filters and profiles.
Simple Answers
Creating your own custom method of tracking your traffic can be done with free web statistic counters or enterprise class analytics software. It really depends how extravagant you want your data and if you action it. Moreover, how committed you are to analysis, improving ROI and customer relationship marketing . I would always recommend using good analytics software such as Google Analytics to obtain the most comprehensive view of traffic statistics web site data .
The best quality traffic statistics reporting system will come from a series of different reports depending on what you are trying to accomplish. My point is, do not limit yourself to one method of analysis to obtain 100% of your data decision-making material. Create your own intelligent information network. There are hundreds of different websites you can use to get a different angle of data that will help answer very specific questions. It is important to decide before you begin traffic statistic analysis what your core objectives are.



