Which Traffic Stat Should I Be Looking At?

Hi Tiff,

I think it is down to what you want to do with them and the type of site.

Bragging rights then hits are best as it is the highest.

Business wise unique's are cool, but page views are also relevant and these are the two I look at the most. I don't want people to come look at one page and go to the next site, I want them to stick around a while and do something.

Similarly tracking repeat visitors is also good in many ways.

A lot of the above depends on the type of site though.

Phil

Hits is the amount of processors from the cpu so that cannot be used for traffic stats at all. Unique is good but also look at "Connect to site from" in awstats as that will give you a good indication from where you traffic is from and what they do. Daily visits is also good but that is not uniques but a combination of visitors, return visitors, pages view etc.

A lot of people makeout there sites had a lot of traffic by saying they had 50 000 hits but when you check the uniques it is only 50.

If you interested in buying a site and the seller claims lot of visitors dont ask him for the uniques or daily visits but for the "Connect to site from" as that will reveal the source of the traffic and if there is a lot of hits ask the seller for the "Hosts (Top 25)" as that will reveal the origin of the ip of the traffic.It is easy to buy 20000 visitors a month for three months (pay to surf) and then show unique visitors for the last 3 months showing good traffic but when you ask for the other stats the seller will backoffSorry got a bit carried away here but a lot of people dont know about this and get caught.

Hi Tiff,

I agree with Phil about unique visitors and page views.
You also need to evaluate how long visitors are looking at your site.
You can have hundreds of hits with visitors staying for a few seconds. You get plenty of hits but this is only short term.

In conclusion, when you combine unique visitors, page hits and duration of visit, you get a clear picture of your traffic. Quality content and if possible unique content is always a winner.

I started posting this then I saw theimdude's post. All this info put together is a great start.

Tiff,

Quick Version
- unique visitors
- bounce rate
- traffic sources
- time on site
- # of pages
- keywords


Detailed Version

Just finished looking my morning stats

You need to look at unique visitors (compare day to day, month to month). You need to look at the bouce rate (# of people that click the back button)

If you have 100 visitors and your bounce rate is 90%.

OR

If you have 50 visitors and your bounce rate is 20%

Which is better? I would choose the second since people are staying on your site.

Next I look at traffic sources (this is second most important to unique visitors for me).
You want to know which of your traffic efforts are paying off for you so you will know what you can do for consistent traffic. You also want to look at sources you dont know about, since you may learn new ways to get traffic (Example that this works - I did this with a site that someone posted my link on a Quesiton/Answer site I never heard of and got me 10 visitors in a week, thanks to Google Analytics and looking at those stats now gets my almost 3000 visitors a month consistantly from that one site over the last 15 months).

Next 2 are optional based on your site. That would be how long they stay on your website? & how many pages. If you are sending them straight to the buy page, then why are they looking at other stuff (may be credability etc...) and longer they stay, the more likely they will buy.

I can go on, but will share one last stat that is important and that is your keywords. If you know the keywords that people are actaully coming to your website, then you can also focus on using those is article or outside marketing. This way you will doninate the first several spots from your website as well other sites. Remember these are proven keywords that have brought someone to your website.

Mukul

Mukul beat me to the punch

I totally agree that this is more about a system of metrics rather than a single one which only tells part of the story. A look at a number of visits can give the most general idea of how well a site fares, but it wouldn't tell whether it would be desirable to seek traffic from other sources. I like to consider the number of visits in combination with, on the one hand, the traffic sources and the keywords, and, on the other hand, bounce rates and page views.

Wow more confusing than I thought. I was just trying to see if my traffic is considered poor, average or fairly good. I know it's not "servers go down" level.

So here's some info:

Unique: 9319
Number of visits: 20895 (2.24 visits/visitor)
Pages: 57347 (2.74 Pages/Visit)
Hits: 338415 (16.19 Hits/Visit)
Bandwidth: 37.19 GB (1866.14 KB/Visit)

Thursday is the highest traffic day: Pages - 2026.20 Hits - 13359.80 Bandwidth - 679.29 MB

Hosts: Hosts : 0 Known, 19414 Unknown (unresolved ip) 9319 Unique visitors

17 different robots

Visit duration: Number of visits: 20895 - Average: 270 s
0s-30s 16512 79 %
30s-2mn 917 4.3 %
2mn-5mn 679 3.2 %
5mn-15mn 921 4.4 %
15mn-30mn 645 3 %
30mn-1h 700 3.3 %
1h+ 521 2.4 %

892 different pages-url

Connect to site from:

Direct address / Bookmark / Link in email... pages - 39885 Percent - 87.9 % hits- 52424 percent - 72.8 %

Links from an Internet Search Engine... pages - 1968 Percent - 4.3 % hits - 4984 percent - 6.9 %

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)... pages - 3370 percent - 7.4 % hits - 14482 percent - 20.1 %

599 different keyphrases

What I'm trying to sort out is where I need to focus my efforts in traffic generation. Not exactly sure how this information will help me above.

In addition to some of the things people have said:

ALWAYS keep track of your top pages. It's absolutely key to a successful SEO campaign and building up domain trust. Know why your traffic is going where. This is something we monitor constantly in our SEO department for all of our clients.

Most of all, keep track of conversions... Traffic is useless if it's not converting how you want it to. Whether its to contact you, buy something, go somewhere, download something... track it, tweak it, improve it.

Alex

I count my bounce rate as the most important, i mean what use is busting your gut advertising if your page aint converting to a sale/opt in....