Thursday, November 15, 2007

5 Monitors for Ultimate Business Performance: Part 3 Web Traffic Monitoring

3. Web Traffic Monitoring (a.k.a. Visitors Tracking, Hit Counters, Web Analytics, Web Statistics) – monitors website page views and visitors. It is possible to monitor web traffic via 3 different techniques: a) by including visible or invisible html code into web pages which sends requests to an external counter b) by using web log analyzers like open source Webalizer or c) by using network sniffers. The last is quite rare and only used by large Internet portals. Now html code options becomes more popular especially when users don’t have access to the server for example in case of blog service providers.

Who should use it: business owners, IT, web marketers, webmasters, web developers.

Usage examples: Demographics of the visitors may provide better understanding from where users visit the website. Unique visitors trend also shows how well is site promoted. Referrers and keywords analysis are useful for search engine optimization and search engine marketing. QA and Web developers may perform load analysis and also find most popular browsers and OS so they can check and optimize the site for these platforms.

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